


Sky Blue

by watanuki_sama



Category: Common Law (TV)
Genre: Death, Love Conquers All, M/M, Mild Gore, Post-Apocalypse, Some Swearing, Switching tenses, Third Person POV, Undeath, Warm Bodies AU, Wesvis, Zombie tropes, Zombie!Wes, Zombies, first person POV, switching POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-08-22 13:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8287504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watanuki_sama/pseuds/watanuki_sama
Summary: Travis knows all about corpses: they’re mindless, emotionless monsters who exist only to eat humans. Then a corpse saves his life, and Travis realizes that everything he thought he knew was wrong.





	1. Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Because Zombies.
> 
>  
> 
> Also posted on FF.net under the penname 'EFAW' on 10.15.16.

_“You said everyone you know one day will surely die_  
_but everything that dies in some way returns.”_  
_—Matthew & The Atlas, “Everything That Dies”_

\---

Above all else, death is cold.

Life is vibrant, and full of fire. It is heat and passion and emotion. Without that, there is nothing. There is an empty coldness that burrows deeper and deeper until you are so hungry for warmth you’ll devour anything in your path to get it.

I was alive, once. I was warm, once.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember how it happened. War, maybe, or plague. A lab experiment that went wrong, perhaps.

Whatever it was, it killed most of the world. Humanity holed up in great walled cities, and the rest of us…

The rest of us just died.

I don’t remember much from before. It happens, when you’re dead. You lose things. Memories, motor function. Feelings.

I remember grass, green beneath my fingers. I don’t remember what it felt like, or smelled like, but I remember the color, bright and vibrant and _alive_.

And I remember blue, clear and beautiful, the sky over my head.

The sky isn’t blue anymore. Now it’s just a dull grey.

Or maybe that’s just me.

\---

Travis was old enough he still remembered what it was like, before the world ended. He remembered cars clogging the streets and airplanes flying overhead, remembered going to work every day with nothing more to worry about than being in an accident and popping by the grocery store on the way home if he wanted coffee and chocolate.

Now…now the world was in shambles, the dead walked the streets, and the surviving humans eked out a living in a protected settlement behind a massive wall.

Some days—most days, actually, if he wasn’t out on a raid—when he was done with his work, he would climb up the scaffolding to the highest part of the wall, staring out at the ruined city beyond. He could still remember when it was gleaming, miles of shiny skyscrapers and lines of cars and people swarming the roads. On those days, if he’d tilted his head towards the sky, he could see a perfect California blue sky, with puffy white clouds floating lazily along.

He never looked up much, back then. Never saw a reason to. It had never seemed important.

Now…

The sky was a pale, watery blue-grey, like even the atmosphere had given up with the rest of the world. The only clouds he ever saw were fat grey rain clouds, spitting lightning and booming thunder, sweeping across the ruined metropolis to try and wash everything clean.

It never worked. The rain stopped and the clouds cleared and the city was still the same dingy, ruined place it had been for almost a decade.

Sitting atop the wall, legs dangling towards the ground far below him, Travis tilted his head to the sky and closed his eyes, and he remembered.

\---

Green grass, bright as a jewel. 

Dark, rich brown soil churning through my fingers, staining my nail beds. 

The bright red shell of a ladybug, perched delicately on a sunny yellow dandelion, and I wait until it flies off before ripping the weed from the ground.

The sky, endless and vast above me, a beautiful, glorious blue, spreading on forever, from one edge of the world to the other.

These are the things I remember. The only clear memories I have, the only ones I can hold on to. Colors, so bright and full of life, filling the world to the brim until it’s bursting.

Now there are drab greys and browns and blacks, an endless parade of the dead wandering through a dead world.

I think, if I could ever touch that sharp green, or if I could reach out and grasp that blue, so beautiful it makes me ache…

I think I would clutch it tight and never let it go.

\---

The first time Travis saw him was in the middle of a raid. It was a noisy mess, guns going off, people screaming, corpses growling and snarling. The fuckers moved _fast_ when they were hungry, across the room in a second, and there was barely enough time to pull the trigger. Headshots, if you were lucky. Body shots to buy a moment, push them back just a second.

And in the midst of it all, there was this guy in a tattered grey suit, spinning and whirling and moving with a fluid grace Travis had never seen in corpses before. Most of them were lumbering, lurching bodies, even when they were hunting. This one was just fucking _graceful_.

Then Travis got distracted by a corpse coming up on his left, and by the time he turned around again, the corpse in the grey suit was gone.

Travis didn’t forget. Even as he moved among the survivors of the raid, checking for bite marks and pulling aside those who’d been bitten, he couldn’t get the image of that spinning, graceful figure out of his head.

He forced himself to forget about it, to put it out of his mind and focus on the mission.

It was hard to forget.

\---

There’s not much to do when you’re dead. Shuffle around. Bump into stuff. Shuffle around some more.

Sometimes we eat. Shuffle out until we find people, and then…

It’s not like I want to eat people. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just get hungry.

I try to ignore it, best I can. Push it aside and don’t think about it. The hunger is always there, a raw gnawing inside me. There are some who keep going, always hunting, always searching, always looking for something to fill the emptiness.

I’ve made my peace with it. I’ll never be full. Never _not_ be hungry. So instead, I push it away, don’t think about it until I get too starved to think. The rest of the time…

Well, most of the time, there’s nothing to do. Just walk around.

I used to have hobbies, I’m sure. I don’t remember what they were, but I must have. Who doesn’t have hobbies?

Now? Now I walk. It’s all I can do, really.

I like to walk in the cities. It’s dangerous. There are humans all the time, and humans don’t ask questions. They shoot first, and don’t stop to think.

But I like the city. I like the buildings, and the cars. The posters and graffiti on the wall.

I like the memory of what the world used to be.

And I think, if one of them shot me…

Well, this is no life to lead. I don’t think I’d mind dying.

Again, I mean.

\---

The second time Travis saw him was on patrol.

They patrolled in pairs, but Phil was an idiot who moved on without checking and clearing doorways first. It was going to get him killed one of these days. Travis couldn’t honestly bring himself to care too much.

He was walking, Phil a good ten feet ahead, chattering on about something Travis didn’t care about. And Travis looked to his left and saw him, at the end of an alley. The corpse in the grey suit. Just standing there, head tilted back.

Travis should have called for Phil, but it was an easy shot, so he just raised his gun—

He couldn’t pull the trigger.

There was no real reason. He just looked at the corpse, at the back of his head tilted up to the sky, and Travis couldn’t do it. Couldn’t shoot an unarmed man in the back.

Even though he knew what this guy was, _knew_ what kind of damage the corpses had wrought on the world, he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t kill him.

And then he looked up through the sight, following the corpse’s gaze, and Travis’s breath caught in his throat.

On the wall at the end of the alley was an angel. Someone, probably back before the end of the world, had painted an angel on the wall, ten feet high. Draped in blue with huge white wings and arms outspread, and a beauteous smile on her face. And the corpse was just standing there, staring at it.

_Corpses don’t feel_ , Captain always said. _Corpses don’t think. They just attack, and kill._

But this corpse was staring at an angel on the wall, in a dead-end alley with no humans in sight. Nothing to eat.

It wasn’t the action of a typical corpse. Travis didn’t understand.

He must have made some sound, some slight noise, because when he looked back down, the corpse was staring at him. Travis tensed, finger on the trigger, but the corpse didn’t move. He stared at Travis, with eyes so cold a blue it almost hurt.

The corpse didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just stared.

Travis lowered the gun.

The corpse tilted his head, watching him. For a second, it was like the world stopped, all sound ceasing, like the earth itself was holding its breath.

And then he moved, and Travis whipped his gun back up, but he wasn’t moving toward him. Wasn’t attacking.

Just slowly lifted his arms to his side.

Like the angel on the wall.

Travis could shoot, could pull the trigger and take one more corpse out, rid the world of one more pest.

“Travis!” Phil’s voice was loud in the still city, echoing off buildings. “What’re you doing? Everything alright?”

Travis stared at the corpse, at that piercing ice blue gaze watching him, and lowered his gun to his side.

“Yeah, I’m coming, I’m coming.” He nodded at the corpse. Turned his back. It wasn’t something you were supposed to do, turn your back. You shot first, before they had a chance to attack.

The corpse in the grey suit didn’t attack.

Travis felt his gaze on the back of his neck until he was out of sight.

\---

I remember holding hands.

I remember someone—a woman?—someone with dark hair and a wide smile. And holding hands, matching rings glinting in the sunlight.

The feel of warmth, and connection. The comfort of companionship.

The soft glow in my chest.

Walking through the green, holding hands, laughing brightly like birds floating in the sky.

I don’t remember how to laugh anymore.

I haven’t held hands in a long time.

I bring my hands together, try to wrap stiff dead fingers together. It’s not the same. Cold, dead flesh against cold dead flesh. None of the warmth of life.

You are alive, with eyes so blue and a fire in your heart. I could see it.

Fire, fire, burning bright, but not so bright it consumes everything.

You didn’t shoot. I wonder why.

Are you different? I’m different. I think I am.

Your eyes were so blue. Blue like the sky.

So _alive_.

\---

The third time Travis saw him, Travis thought for sure he was about to die.

The raid had gone horribly wrong. Phil didn’t clear the room properly before leading them inside, and everything exploded into chaos and screams. Travis did his best, managed to shoot a corpse before it took a chunk out of Randi, but he twisted his ankle in the process, went down hard. He was pretty sure Phil was a lost cause, and Morgan too, and Travis couldn’t see Ellen anywhere.

And then he was there, the corpse in the grey suit, rising off the ground like a panther. Even with blood on his teeth, dripping down his chin, he was beautiful, the way tigers and lions were beautiful. Dangerous, exotic, more than capable of ripping your throat out but it’d be gorgeous to watch.

That didn’t keep him from pulling the trigger when the corpse moved toward him.

The gun jammed.

Travis scooted back, hitting a counter. He fumbled with the gun, but he knew there’d be no way to get it fixed in time, no way to avoid getting bitten, no way to grab the backup pistol in his ankle holster before the corpse was on him—

The corpse loomed, and Travis closed his eyes, expecting any second to feel teeth on his skin. Expecting death.

He didn’t expect cold fingers to press against his face. He could feel blood smearing on his skin, clumsy hands pushing awkwardly at his flesh.

And a noise, soft against the background screams and gunshots, breathy and floundering.

“Buuuh…”

Like someone trying to talk, after having long forgotten the words.

Travis opened his eyes.

The corpse was less than an inch away, ice blue eyes staring into his own. Travis was surprised by what he saw. Not emptiness, not the blankness of death, but intelligence. There was a mind in there, trapped in a dead body and trying to get out.

Bloodstained lips moved again. “Buuuh…” Fingers pressed at Travis’s temples, and the corpse didn’t look away.

“Buuuh…loo…”

It took a minute to understand. And when he did, Travis’s stomach dropped, and if he weren’t already sitting his knees would have given out. 

Blue.

Corpses weren’t supposed to be able to _talk_.

\---

Blue.

Blue like the sky, burning with the passion of fire.

I remember you.

\---

And then it was over, no more screaming or gunfire, and Travis knew he was the only one alive in a room full of the dead. His breath hitched, and he looked over the corpse’s shoulder, watching the others milling about. Slow and lumbering now, but they would move like lightning as soon as they figured it out—

The corpse patted his cheek, drew his gaze. Travis looked into those icy eyes and saw… _understanding_. Like the corpse actually knew what Travis was feeling.

“Shhh…” the corpse wheezed, running a hand down Travis’s shirt. Blood smeared on the fabric, not the bright red blood of a human, but a dark, reddish-black ooze. Travis spotted the hole in the corpse’s jacket, the fabric sullied by the same black ooze, and swallowed.

“Why are you doing this?” _Corpses have only one reason for what they do_ , the Captain said, _to kill and eat humans_ , but Travis was _sure_ of it, he _knew_ that this one was different. This one was saving him.

The corpse blinked, slow and mechanical, and struggled for words, Travis could see it on his face. “Buh-loo,” he breathed, soft as though he were afraid the other corpses would overhear. Maybe he was. “Sss…afe.”

Travis gaped. “Safe?”

A nod, like a jerk of a puppet. “K-keep…you sss…afe.”

Travis was too stunned to respond. Too stunned to do anything but sit there.

The corpse stepped back, trailing his hand down Travis’s arm. Cold fingers found his hand, wrapped stiff digits around his own, and gently tugged at him. In shock, Travis followed the motion, tried to rise. His ankle crumpled beneath him, a sharp lance of pain when he put weight on it, and he bit his lip to keep from crying out. Couldn’t draw attention to himself, couldn’t…

The corpse watched him, head tilted to the side. It was a little unnerving, that cold gaze trained on him. The guy didn’t even blink.

He reached out, poked at Travis’s ankle with a stiff finger, and Travis made a sound. The man in the grey suit snapped his head up, and he went still, like a—like a corpse.

“Shhhhh,” he hissed, a thin release of air through his teeth. Travis swallowed, nodded. 

He didn’t understand what was happening here. Didn’t know why this guy was…was _saving_ him. That’s not what corpses did.

But if it was a choice between being saved by a corpse or being eaten, Travis would definitely take the former.

This time, when the corpse tugged at him, Travis managed to get upright without making a sound, though he almost bit through his lip doing it. Still holding his hand, the corpse shuffled towards the door. Travis…well, there’s wasn’t much else he could do. He certainly couldn’t run away. He kept his head down and hobbled after the corpse, holding his breath when they passed by other corpses.

Travis didn’t know what was going to happen, but he had a feeling in his gut that it would be safer to be with this corpse than left to on own, especially with a wounded leg.

The corpse led him to the door. Travis saw Randi, covered in gore, huddled under a counter with her hand over her mouth. He met her eyes, and saw the fear and the question there, but there was nothing he could say.

Nothing he could do except slowly shuffle out, following the dead man in the grey suit.

\---

Blue. Blue and fire _I remember you_ so alive, so warm and passionate and burning. When I touched you my fingers tingled.

I want you. Want your warmth, want your life, want to keep you safe. _Keep you safe_ , have to keep you safe, keep your fire burning, alive alive _alive_ stay alive need you to stay alive.

I can feel it spreading in me, the longer I hold your hands. Feel the warmth in my fingers, the tingle in my chest.

I don’t remember being alive but I think it was something like this.

_keep you safe warm fire alive BLUE BLUE BLUE_

Home. I’ll take you home. Keep you safe.

_BURN blue flame stay alive keep you safe_

Let’s go home.

\---

The corpse didn’t change his pace. Didn’t speed up or slow down, just kept going at the same ungainly shuffle. It was nothing like the speed and ferocity of a hunting corpse—this was barely above walking pace, and Travis could easily keep up, even if his ankle kept sending little warning signs up his leg with every step.

By the time the corpse led him to a building, Travis had settled into a sort of numb state of shock. He wished he could have taken the chance to break free, run away until he found somewhere safe to hide. Just curl up until he could get back to the wall and the settlement. Randi had probably already told them he’d been taken off by a corpse. No doubt they thought he was dead; he was due for a warm welcome when he returned.

But he couldn’t leave, not yet. With a bum ankle he was a walking target, and he didn’t have any way to defend himself. If he could find someplace to wait it out, stay until his ankle healed and he could make his way home…

Mind spinning in tired circles, he shuffled in the corpse’s footsteps, not even paying attention to where he was going. He stumbled over steps and through doorways without looking, content to follow the firmly gentle pressure on his hand until… Hell, he didn’t know. This was all so surreal, he didn’t know _what_ was happening anymore.

Maybe the corpse was going to eat him anyway, take him to his lair and gobble him up. It was nothing Travis had heard of before, but hell, this whole situation was like nothing he’d ever heard of before. 

He didn’t snap out of it until cold fingers slipped out of his own, and he found himself standing in the middle of a hotel room. The corpse stood there, looking…mildly expectant. Travis blinked, stared, and frowned?

“What the hell?”

The corpse shifted, a hand jerkily sweeping the room. “H...h-ome.”

Travis gaped.

The corpse shuffled to the bed, patting the comforter. A layer of dust floated into the air, slowly settling down. He did it a few more times, which did nothing at all but move the dust around.

“S…eep,” the corpse groaned, lips twisting in a rictus that Travis eventually realized was a _smile_. He pointed at the bathroom door hanging off its hinges. “Www…ter.” He turned down the bed like he was running a bed and breakfast. “St…ay. Here. Sss-afe.”

Travis gaped some more.

The corpse shuffled his feet, frowned. Moved forward, hand outstretched. Despite himself, Travis staggered back. He didn’t know what he was doing, had no idea what was going on, and he couldn’t _believe_ what was happening here.

The corpse’s face didn’t so much as flicker, but something in his eyes seemed to go sad. He stepped back towards the bed, patting the pillow in another cloud of dust. “Sss…eep,” he ordered.

Travis looked at the bed. He looked at the corpse, all awkward, undead eagerness. He looked around the hotel room.

Home. Stay. Keep you safe.

_Oh._

“You want me to stay here?”

Against that puppet string nod and that twisted smile, and the corpse took a step toward him again. Travis shook his head, hopping back.

“No, I…look, I appreciate you saving me before, I really do, but I can’t stay here. I have a home, a life. Friends. I need to go back.”

“No.” Never before had Travis heard a word so soft sound so vehement. The corpse crowded close, looming, piercing gaze cutting right through Travis. “St- _ay_. Keep you _sss-afe_.” He pointed outside, beyond the hotel room and the world outside. “N-not sss-afe.”

Travis stared, lost for words, searching for some answer in those icy eyes. “Why?” he whispered, feeling lost. “Why me?”

The corpse’s hand came up, brushing the side of his head. “Buh-loo.”

“Yeah, you said that. A few times.”

“Buh-loo. Br—iiight. L-like…the…s—ky.”

“Really?” Travis couldn’t help it, he lifted his eyebrows. “Because I’ve always been told it’s more of an ocean blue—” He cut himself off at the not-expression on the corpse’s face. Right. Don’t annoy your undead captor. “But, you know, sky blue works too. My favorite color, sky blue.”

The corpse blinked, one corner of his mouth twitching. “Keep you sss-afe.” He moved past Travis, shuffling to the door. In the doorway he turned, glaring at Travis, and pointed. “St-ay. S-eep.”

Then he was gone, shuffling down the hall, the door left just an inch ajar.

Travis just stared at the closed door.

“What the _hell?”_

\---

I feel so stupid. I shouldn’t have brought you home. It’s such a mess. Look at this place. The mold on the walls and the dirt all over the floor. I should have cleaned up. I should have kept it clean in the first place. You’re going to think I’m a slob.

Oh god, look at my suit. When did I rip that knee out? And where did all this blood come from? Mirror. I need a mirror. I think there’s one in the lobby.

Oh.

Oh my _god_.

Look at me. I’m a _mess_. My hair is all over the place, and look at all this blood on my face and my clothes. No wonder you were so scared.

Rubbing doesn’t make it go away. How do humans get clean? Water? Would water help? Or…that stuff. The stuff in the bottles that rubbed on the hands and made things clean. I don’t remember what it’s called but I remember it. Flicker glimmer flash, pumping the stuff on my hands and spreading it all over, cool and clean and making things not dirty.

If I find the stuff and clean the blood off, you won’t be so scared and you’ll stay.

Perfect. I’ll get the stuff and then everything will be fine.

\---

Travis wasn’t stupid. He didn’t stay. This was a _corpse’s_ hotel room in the middle of a city full of corpses. For all he knew, the other rooms in this hotel were full of corpses too.

Besides, he didn’t know why the corpse had saved him in the first place. _Keep you safe_ , he’d said, and that was all well and good, but keep Travis safe for _what?_ To eat him later, a little takeout to go? No way, Travis wasn’t about to let that happen. He was quite attached to his life, thankyou very much.

He was going to get home, and he was going to talk to the captain about what happened, but he wasn’t going to _stay_ here.

“Not safe my ass,” Travis grumbled, taking his gun apart and laying the pieces out on the bed. Probably not the best place to disassemble his weapon, but it wasn’t like there was anything else in the room he could spread out on. There was a rotted dresser and a table with three legs. The only other option was the floor, and Travis had no idea what was on this floor. No way was he doing this there.

The corpse called this place his home. Why would a corpse have a home? They didn’t have families, they didn’t need to sleep or rest or curl up somewhere with a good book. And judging by the dust in the room, it wasn’t like the corpse was _living_ here, pun intended. So what was it? Some remnant of humanity lingering behind, even after everything else had gone?

Honestly, when Travis got back to the settlement, he had no fucking clue how he was going to explain this. He barely understood it himself.

On automatic, he cleared out the jam and grimaced when he checked his bullet count. Four bullets left. Well, that was just fucking great, wasn’t it? He didn’t know where he was, exactly, but the raid had been at least a mile from the settlement, and he knew they hadn’t walked _towards_ the wall.

Over a mile in a corpse-infested city with four bullets and six shots in his backup pistol. It would be a suicide run.

Travis was willing to try.

He tore a few strips from the sheets, wrapping them as tight as he could around his ankle. Not an ideal solution, but it was just temporary, just until he got home. Then he could be on bedrest for a few weeks, which after all this sounded like a positively _wonderful_ idea.

Gun in hand, he cracked open the door, peering down the hall. No corpses in either direction, and his friendly neighborhood weirdo was out of sight. Travis didn’t know if he’d get another chance. He had to move now.

He made it out of the silent hotel unscathed, but immediately outside were two female corpses, hovering and staring at each other. One wore a stained floral dress, and would have been cute before she got dead. The other wore a tattered doctor’s coat over a discolored pantsuit.

They both looked his way when he opened the front door.

Travis reflexively brought his gun up, finger on the trigger. The _second_ one of them moved—

But neither did. They just stood there, watching him, something all too knowing in their gazes. Travis swallowed, looking from one corpse to the other.

He looked, and he saw, behind the hazel eyes of the doctor and the brown eyes of the young woman, the same sort of trapped intelligence in his rescuer.

Travis swallowed and mustered up a weak smile. “Hi there.”

The two corpses looked at each other, faces blank. Then they looked at Travis again, staring with those unnerving eyes, and the doctor grunted.

Travis took a step back into the hotel. “Alright. I’m just gonna…go back inside, then.”

Neither of them moved to stop him. He retreated.

Okay, he decided, back in the hotel room with the door firmly closed and his gun in his lap. So maybe he would just stay here. Maybe for a bit.

It was just getting weird out there, and Travis didn’t know what to think. He couldn’t shoot the corpses if he thought every single one was going to be vaguely human. But he couldn’t afford to take the time and see if they were all humanish. Not with only ten bullets.

No, he’d just stay here and wait for a better opportunity, that’s all.

\---

I find the stuff and clean my face and feel better. The stuff doesn’t do anything for my hair and I can’t fix my suit, but the blood is gone so you’ll like me more and you’ll stay. I want you to like me.

If you stay, you’ll have to eat, won’t you? What do humans eat? I eat, but I doubt you eat humans. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any more humans.

What do living people eat?

Trying to remember is hard. Sometimes I have flashes, but most of the time it’s just the now and the here. I remember yesterday and the day before that and an endless stream of days spent shuffling from one place to another, but remembering _before_ is like trying to walk through a wall. It doesn’t work unless you find a spot that’s rotted through, and even then you might not find what you’re looking for.

Humans…what do humans eat…

_flickering candleflame and hands clasped on the table_

_a smile on her face as she brushes her hair away_

_plates of pasta and vegetables, sauce red as blood_

_“This is wonderful,” she says and she laughs_

Okay. Food. Human food. I can do that. I can feed you and you’ll stay and everything will be better.

I shuffle down the aisles of the store I found the stuff and look for the food. I don’t know how long it takes but it feels long, long enough that you might leave, might be so hungry you left my home and tried to go outside. Not safe, not safe notsafe keepyousafe

I shove the food and the stuff in a bag and shuffle back as quickly as I can. Have to keep you safe.

The doctor is in front of the hotel. I don’t know why she keeps coming back, lingering and waiting. There’s nothing to wait for, not anymore. And there’s another one, I haven’t seen her here before but I recognize her from my walks, and they turn and look as I come up.

The doctor points to the hotel and groans, and I pause.

“Lll…” she says, pointing. “Lll…ive. Uuh…lll-ive.”

_Alive_. I clutch my stuff— _groceries_ , they’re called, I remember, going out to get the _groceries_ —and shake my head.

She points again. “A-lllive!”

“N-o.” I slide past her, watching them both. “Mmmine. K-keep sss-afe.” I won’t let them have you. You’re mine, I’ll keep you safe, and I’ll stand between anyone who tries to take you away.

The doctor’s hand drops, and she watches, looking like she knows so much more than I do. “Wwwarm,” she purrs, and I clench my hand. Yes. You’re so warm, vibrant and full of fire and _alive_ , and it makes me greedy, makes me want to hold you close and cut you open and put you inside me so I’ll always have you with me. Mine mine _mine_.

“Mmmine!”

The other one shakes her head, limp curls flopping. Her lips curl in a parody of a smile. That’s all we are, all we can do. Parody, mimick, pretend. We’re not alive. Maybe we never were, maybe we just made up memories because we were so cold and we wanted so badly to be warm.

The other one’s hand floats up, pointing at me, at my chest. “Wwwarm,” she repeats.

I don’t understand.

So I leave. I turn and walk home.

The door is closed. I bump against it a few times, scrabble at the doorknob. My fingers refuse to work, refuse to grasp and turn and push.

So I simply slam my shoulder against the door, and the weak wood splinters open. You’re still there, curled in the chair and watching the door. I ignore the gun. If you wanted to shoot me, I’d let you.

I hold out the stuff. You flinch, but you slowly stand, and I envy the way you move so easily. Life. It’s amazing. It makes you fluid, makes you smooth and perfect and wonderful.

_i want it give it to me stay alive keep you safe_

Our fingers brush as you take the bag, and I feel warm.

\---

Whatever Travis expected when he took the bag from the corpse’s hand, it wasn’t what he found. He stared.

“Really?” He didn’t know if he sounded more incredulous or amused. “That’s…seriously? Dry noodles, a can of tomato sauce, and Purell? That’s…” He glanced up, saw the look on that expressionless face, and swallowed. “That’s…sweet. Thank you.”

The corpse made gave him that death-grin smile. Travis tried not to shudder and hugged the bag to his chest.

“Look, as nice as this was, I can’t…do anything with it.”

Swear to god, the corpse’s face fell.

“I mean, not here. I’d need a kitchen. Water. Pans and stuff.” Travis wasn’t the best cook in the world, but he could manage to make some noodles and sauce if he had to. And since apparently that was his only option…

The corpse stared at him. Travis tried again. “You know, kitchen? Cooking? What am I thinking, you eat your food raw.” He sighed. “Look, just…come with me?” He moved towards the door.

And the corpse moved with that inhuman deadly grace Travis had only seen while the guy was hunting, and Travis tensed, hand going to his gun. The corpse stared at him, hands flat against his chest.

“N-not—”

“Safe, yeah, I know.” Travis rolled his eyes. “But look, if you’re going to feed me I have to cook it. And I can’t cook it here. You can come with me.” He gave the corpse an encouraging smile. “How not safe can it be if you’re with me?”

Travis wished he could understand what the corpse was thinking. Travis was good with people, yes, but those were _living_ humans, people whose faces flickered and changed with their thoughts and emotions. This was like looking at a brick wall. Travis could see thoughts moving behind those blue eyes, but beyond that, there was nothing, no facial tics or tiny clues to help him understand what the corpse was thinking.

To his surprise, the corpse dropped his hands and turned to the broken door. Travis took that to mean the corpse was coming with. Okay. That worked.

_Corpses can be reasoned with,_ he thought, following down the hall. _Who knew._

_No one. I’m the only one who knows._

He made a silent vow to get out of here. The others had to know.

Everything they’d thought was wrong. They _had_ to know.

\---

I remember as we go to the kitchen.

_kitchen, gleaming steel and smooth countertops_

_steam rising from pans on the stove_

_she smiles and kisses my cheek_

_“I have the best chef in the world”_

Sometimes memories only hurt.

\---

The kitchen was in just as decrepit a state as the rest of the hotel, but one of the stoves still worked and the water ran. Travis supposed that had to be good enough.

He washed one of the pans in the sink and filled it, setting it to boil. The corpse brought another pan over, dropped it, picked it up, and set it on the stove. And it was funny until he picked up the sauce can like he was going to try and open it and pour it in.

“No, no, hey, let me do that.” No way did Travis want sauce in a pan that hadn’t been washed. There was a layer of grime in the surface; he could barely _see_ the metal below. He took the pan and sauce from the corpse’s hands. “We’re good. Just…stand over there and let me work.” He pushed the corpse out of the way and went to work.

It occurred to him, as he was washing the second pan, that this was very strange. If anyone else had been taken like this, they wouldn’t simply be standing here making spaghetti in an old hotel kitchen. They would have fought their way out or died trying. He even knew a few people who would have eaten one of those precious bullets, rather than risk becoming a corpse.

But Travis had always been good about adapting to his situation, surviving one day after another until he found himself somewhere safe. That’s all this was. Adapting. One day at a time. One step in front of the other, until he was behind the wall and could sleep easily once more.

The corpse hadn’t eaten him yet. Travis would just be on guard.

It took a bit of digging before he gave up on finding a can opener and cut a slit in the tomato sauce can with a knife. By the time the water for the pasta was boiling, he had the sauce warmed up and ready to go.

The corpse lingered, watching, and Travis sighed. “Look, go find a plate or something, alright? Stop hovering like that. It’s making me nervous.”

The corpse stared, then shuffled off. Travis sighed and stirred the noodles.

There were at least three separate crashes from the other side of the kitchen. By the time the corpse returned with a relatively unbroken plate, the noodles had finished cooking and Travis had found some silverware and a glass. He washed them all, served the pasta and sauce, filled the glass from the tap, and hopped up on the counter to eat. The corpse just stood there, silent and pensive, watching and watching and watching and jesus, Travis just couldn’t take it.

“So, what’s your name?” he asked, shoving a forkful of pasta into his mouth.

The corpse blinked.

“You know. A name. Something I can call you. Do you even have a name?”

More blinking, then that slow processing in blue eyes Travis was beginning to recognize. Travis waited. And ate. And waited some more while the rusty gears in the corpse’s head moved.

“…don’t…re…mem…ber.”

That was practically a complete sentence. Impressive.

“Don’t remember? That sucks. What _do_ you remember?”

The corpse blinked, tilted his head. Travis knew a dog that did that, once, like maybe turning his head would show things in a whole new light. Travis wondered what the corpse was seeing.

“Buh-loo. S—ky.”

“Right. Yes. Blue sky.” Travis shoved another bite of pasta in his mouth. _God_ , this was good. Raiding parties never ventured out this far into the city, and the areas around the settlement were pretty picked clean. Travis hadn’t had pasta in _ages_.

“Well, I can’t just call you ‘corpse’. You need a name. Hmm…” Travis tapped the end of his fork against his chin thoughtfully. “You kind of remind me of an old teacher I had. Mr. Wessert. Wore a suit and tie every day. He was kind of an asshole.”

The corpse stared at him.

“How about Wes? I could see you as a Wes.”

The corpse’s head tilted to the side again. Travis could almost see the rusty gears turning.

After a minute, the edges of the corpse’s mouth turned up, that same awful rictus he’d given before, but his eyes were alight, and he nodded jerkily. 

Travis continued to be surprised by this guy.

“Alright. Wes it is. I’m Travis, by the way. Nice to meet you.”

The blank face tilted to the side like a bird. “Trrr…a…vs.”

Travis felt the corner of his mouth curling up. “Yeah, close enough.”

\---

_How about Wes?_

Wes.

A name. Names are important. Humans have names.

I don’t remember my name. It might have started with a W, but maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was something else. I don’t know.

Humans have names that label them, that mark them as unique. As special. Like _Travis_ , with eyes like the sky and the flame inside your soul, burning bright and shining through your eyes.

Special. Precious. 

_keep you safe_

Wes.

Now I’m special too.

\---

Travis finished the whole pan of pasta. To be fair, he hadn’t eaten since early this morning, before the raid, and he was starving. Still, he should have saved some. It’d be nice to have something to eat tomorrow. The corpse—Wes, he had a name now—took hours to come back with the pasta. Guess he couldn’t move with purpose when he wasn’t hunting ( _not thinking about it shut up brain_ ).

By the time he’d finished eating, it was almost dark outside. Even Travis knew better than to go outside in the dark. That was when the corpses came out in force. Maybe they were nocturnal. Maybe they just didn’t like the sun. Whatever, Travis was pretty sure that not even his undead host and any amount of corpse-blood could keep him safe if he ventured out at night.

So they shuffled back to the hotel room, playing an odd dance where they each tried to maneuver behind each other. No way was Travis walking with a corpse at his back, even a strange one like this. And the corpse…hell, Travis had no idea what his motivations where. Keeping the blue safe, whatever. Still not enough reason to walk with an undead brain-eater behind him.

The bed was just as dusty as he recalled, plumes spiraling into the air when he patted it. Well, no worries. He’d slept upright before. He could handle it.

“I’ll crash here,” he announced, dropping into the chair with his gun in his lap. “And tomorrow we’ll talk about getting me home.”

“No,” Wes grumbled, standing at the foot of the bed. “Stay here. K-keep you safe.”

“We’ll see.” In a battle of wills, Travis wasn’t sure who’d win, himself or the guy who’d continued to function long after he was dead. They’d see in the morning. Yawning, he slouched in the chair, gun in his lap. “Honestly, I doubt I’ll get any sleep. You are not exactly conducive to a good night’s rest, man.” Still, he closed his eyes, because he needed to rest and gather his strength, and if Wes changed his mind and decided to eat him during the night, well, at least it would be quick. “Try not to wake me unless corpses bust the door down, alright?”

It had been an exhausting day.

He dropped off within a minute.

\---

The dead don’t sleep. The closest we have to dreaming are the memories, flashes of _before_ that cross our eyes. But those fade, the longer we linger, and eventually they disappear until there’s nothing left.

It should be boring, watching you sleep, but I’m dead. There’s not much else to do, and I don’t get bored.

And you aren’t boring. You twitch, did you know that? You twitch and you mumble and you react to things I can’t see.

It’s not boring to watch you at all.

\---

Travis grunted awake and had his gun pointed at the corpse before he remembered where he was. Right. The corpse’s hotel room in the abandoned hotel.

Damn. Yesterday hadn’t been a dream after all.

Travis rubbed a hand over his eyes, yawning. “You know, it’s really fucking creepy to have someone stare at you all night.”

Wes didn’t stop staring. Well, of course not.

With a groan, Travis stood, stretching his arms above his head. Oh, that felt good. He closed his eyes in pleasure, twisting his hips and hearing his back crack. He _could_ sleep in chairs. That did not mean it was in any way comfortable.

Wes groaned, and Travis opened his eyes to find the corpse leaning forward, watching him, a dark look in his eyes, almost…

… _hungry_.

Travis froze, hands above his head. “Wes? Buddy, you okay?”

The corpse made a sound, halfway between a grumble and a growl. “A-lllive.”

“Yeah, I know I’m alive. That’s my biggest selling feature.” Travis took a wary step backwards. “You, uh…you haven’t changed your mind about eating me, have you?”

The corpse stepped forward, one hand outstretched. “Wwwant. In-siiide.”

Fuck. Fuckity _fuck_. 

“Hey, man, I thought we had a good thing going here. You know, the one where you don’t eat me and I don’t shoot you…” Travis shuffled back a few more steps, pulling his gun from his belt. “You haven’t changed your mind, now have you?”

Wes paused, and he frowned, sort of—his brows drew in, and his mouth turned down a little. “N-not eat. No…” Travis supposed he couldn’t remember the words, because he just made a sort of chompy motion with his teeth. “Sss-afe.”

“Well. Good. That’s…good. Cuz I really don’t want to be inside you, man.”

“No. It’s…” The corpse’s hands jerk through the air, and Travis tensed again, but then he realized that the corpse was _gesticulating_ , agitated hand motions to convey his frustration.

This guy was seeming more and more human by the minute.

“Wwwarm,” Wes groaned, a shaky hand patting his own chest. “H-here. Fffire. A-lllive.”

Travis just shook his head helplessly. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

\---

I know what I want to say. The words are there, inside my head, lined up in neat orderly rows. If I could just get them out, you would understand and you wouldn’t leave.

_I need you. You have to stay. I can feel the warmth of your fire, burning inside me, burning the cold away. You make me feel alive again. Keep you safe._

But when I try to say them, the words get lost in the darkness.

_I don’t understand what you’re saying_ , you tell me, and I hate it. I hate being dead, I hate not being able to tell you what I mean. If I could make the words come out right, you _would_ understand, and then you’d stay.

Instead you’re cradling your gun, edging towards the door. Saying, “I need to get back,” and, “It’s been fun, let’s do this again sometimes,” and, “I’m really grateful for the save, okay,” and you’re heading for the door and you _can’t!_ You can’t leave! I need you!

“No!”

I grab you, pull you back. “No! Stay. _Safe!”_

You’re scared. You bring your gun up, and I can smell the fear on you. You don’t understand. _I need you._ You bring the warmth back. I don’t _want_ to be dead, I don’t _want_ to hurt people. I want to live again. You give me that. I can feel it, your fire, flickering up my arms where I grabbed you, and I need you here because if you go the fire will die and I’ll go back to before and I’m so tired of being cold and dead and _nothing_.

I need the words.

“Stay. N-need. Fire wwarm. Stay _safe_. A-lllive!”

You swallow, and I can see you trying to fight your fear. It’s brave, so brave, and again I’m reminded how special you are. The others, they would have shot. They wouldn’t have hesitated. You don’t. You listen, and I can see you don’t understand, but you’re trying.

“O-okay,” you say, and your voice shakes. You let go of your gun. “Okay. I’ll stay.”

It’s not enough. You still don’t understand. I still don’t have the words.

But for right now, it’ll have to do.

\---

For a moment, Travis had been sure it was all over. That Wes had snapped and gone back to being one the corpses everyone knew. The ones that killed people with no other thought than to feed, and Travis was going to be next on the list.

Instead, Travis got nonsensical ramblings and fervent exhortations to stay, that he’d keep him safe. 

So Travis stayed. It wasn’t like he could do anything else. His ankle was still aching, and if Wes wasn’t going to let him go there was no way Travis could make it past him alone. Travis probably wouldn’t even make it to the street before Wes caught him and either dragged him back or gave it up and just ate him.

And that wasn’t even taking into account the other corpses wandering around, like the doctor and the brunette in the flowered dress. Who knew how many were out there between him and the settlement?

No. The best thing to do was just sit tight and wait for his leg to heal. As soon as he could run, he could make a break for it, but until then…

If he tried to leave now, there was no way he’d make it. But if he stayed, he just might survive this.

Travis was adaptable. He could make this work. He’d just be on his guard, and if it looked like Wes was going to turn on him, he’d take that shot.

“Alright.” Travis dropped onto the end of the bed, sending up a cloud of dust into the air. He sneezed; Wes didn’t.

“Alright,” he said again, looking around. An empty, dirty hotel room with a corpse standing guard at the door.

Travis groaned and ran his hands over his face, feeling caked corpse-blood under his fingers. 

Oh boy, _this_ was gonna be fun.

\---

I watch you. You are so expressive, so intense, even in the smallest of things. I watch you, and I long to reach out, to reach inside of you and find what makes you so alive and make it my own. There is a sense of loss, of emptiness, a cold ache so deep inside I cannot name it. There is a hunger, a greed. You are fascinating even when you are doing _nothing_ , when you merely lay there and _breathe_.

So alive, so vibrant, so warm.

I watch you, and I cannot look away.

\---

The first thing he did was wash his face. There was water in the bathroom. It was ice cold and he didn’t dare use a lot in case this was all there was. But there was enough to get the worst of the grime and black-red blood off his face. When he dried himself off and looked in the cracked, dirty mirror, he actually recognized the person staring back.

The second thing he did was search the room. Twice. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular—he was just looking for something to _do_. Even a moldy paperback in a drawer would be a pleasant surprise. But there was _nothing_ , just empty drawers and dust.

The third thing he did was sit down, because his ankle was really starting to put up a fight. Too much moving around today, and yesterday certainly hadn’t done him any favors. He could actually _feel_ it throbbing, though when he pulled off his boot there was only a little swelling and bruising. Still, when he stood up experimentally there was an alarming moment when he wasn’t sure his ankle would hold him up, so he decided trying to escape was _not_ on the scorecard today.

The fourth thing he did was slump in the chair and look at Wes. Wes stared steadily back, not moving, not blinking, not breathing. It was really creepy, actually. Like being stared at by a statue, except the statue could think and move and possibly eat him if it got peckish.

He sighed. “That’s all you’re gonna do, man? Just…stand there, watching me?” Wes didn’t respond; Travis sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “No, yeah, that—that’s fine, that’s cool. Not creepy at _all_.”

Wes’s head tilted, like a dog. Could corpses even understand sarcasm?

Travis fidgeted, gaze roaming the room, before settling once more on the corpse at the door. “Seriously, do—do you have to stare? Cuz you’re not even blinking and it—it’s really weird, man.”

Wes, very slowly, blinked.

“Oh, haha, very cute. That’s very clever. How long did it take to come up with that one?” He fidgeted some more, tapping his fingers on the arm of the chair. “Will you at least sit _down?_ I don’t like you looming.”

Wes’s head slowly tilted to the other side. He blinked again.

“Sit down.” Travis motioned at the bed. “You know. Bend your knees and _sit_.” When Wes made no move, Travis helpfully gesticulated. “You. Bed. Sit.”

Wes looked at the bed.

Wes looked at Travis.

“Please sit down?”

Jerkily, like he was put together with puppet strings, Wes moved to the bed and sat. Another billow of dust flurried up at the sudden weight. Wes didn’t so much as blink, his icy gaze fixed right on Travis.

No less creepy, but at least Wes was _sitting_ now, which made Travis relax. It was stupid and illogical, probably his knee-jerk reaction to authority figures (which Wes sort of looked like, suit and tie and all) combined with a perfectly normal revulsion for corpses in all shapes and sizes, resulting in an all-too-human need to have Wes at his eyesight, not looming over him.

Or maybe he just didn’t like having people standing over him when he was injured and unable to probably move. Could be anything, really—he had his issues and he knew it. (They all did, in this clusterfuck the world had turned into.)

And it was ridiculous to relax, _dangerous_ to relax, when he knew first-hand exactly how fast the corpses could move when they were motivated. Sitting wouldn’t be a deterrent at all if Wes decided Travis looked like a munchy crunchy snack.

Still, he couldn’t help himself: some of the tension bled out of his shoulders, and he relaxed into the chair.

\---

You do not sit still. The dead, we have turned stillness into an art form—even when we are moving, there is a lack, because we do not live, and so much of movement has to do with life itself. But you do not, _cannot_ sit still, crossing and uncrossing your legs, tapping your fingers on the chair, continually shifting in your seat.

Were I alive, perhaps I would find this… _annoying_ , the word comes to me, wafting up from the depths where my memories of _before_ lie. Perhaps, if my living energy combated yours for space, your restless, nervous movement would annoy me.

But I am dead, and instead I feel fascinated, enraptured by your movement, and a yearning, quiet ache deep inside.

“Man,” you say in a great, explosive breath, “This is _not_ my style.” You rise—I move to follow. You mustn’t go outside. But you wave your hand. “Oh, don’t get your panties in a wad, I’m not going anywhere.”

As I watch, you grab the arm of the chair and drag it across the floor, turning it so you can see out the window.

You are sitting so I am not out of your sight, but you are not watching me. You are staring out the window, watching the world outside.

As you watch the world, I watch you.

\---

If anyone had asked Travis what corpses did when they weren’t trying to eat people, he would have honestly said he hadn’t thought about it much. There were two modes of action in his life—times when he dealt with corpses, and times when he didn’t. Times when he dealt with corpses were usually spent shooting like his life depended on it, because, really, it did. Times when he wasn’t dealing with corpses…well, there were a thousand other things to do in the settlement, and not a moment to spare on useless speculation.

Sometimes, when he sat on the wall, looking out at the ruined metropolis, he could see them, shambling in the streets, aimless and purposeless. If he _had_ given any thought to what corpses did, he’d have probably said that. They just…walked, without purpose, mindless and instinctual.

He was rapidly changing his opinion. Wes, of course, was the biggest factor in that, but it was more, too. As he sat there, staring out the dingy, rotted curtains, he could see other corpses on the street. There was some shambling going on, certainly. But it didn’t look mindless.

No, it didn’t look mindless at all.

There was one couple that kept drawing his eye. They were both older corpses—age-wise, not rotting-body-wise. Probably would have been in their fifties or sixties, back before they were turned. They were just sitting on a bench in front of Dumont Hardware—not even at the same ends of the bench. They weren’t looking at each other, weren’t even so much as glancing at each other, but Travis had played that game before, sitting near some pretty young thing and acting like he wasn’t interested even though he was.

They were corpses. They _shouldn’t_ be interested. But there was something in the way they sat there that evoked images of innocent young tweens who didn’t quite know how to asked for what they wanted, and it made Travis’s heart ache in his chest.

There was just…so much they’d never wondered about before, and he was starting to think that was a very, very big mistake.

\---

Time is meaningless to the dead. It passes, but we do not move through it—we are merely observers to the roll of minutes and hours and days. Time does not affect us, so it drags on endlessly.

I could watch you forever and it would feel like moments.

You spend the majority of your time staring out the window. At times you will shift, mutter to yourself, ask inane questions that do not require an answer. I cannot tear my eyes away.

At some point, you fall asleep, slumped in the chair. I long ago stopped counting the passage of time, but even if hours have passed, it still feels like mere seconds.

I spend a few more moments watching you sleep. Even the rise and fall of your chest is fascinating, the influx of air followed by the steady exhalation. Ceaseless, endless. Beautiful.

Were I to lay down and close my eyes, I would look simply like—like a dead body. No one would ever mistake me for being alive.

No one could possibly mistake you for anything _but_.

When I am certain you are deeply asleep, I rise, make my way out of the room. Perhaps the one advantage to being dead—we make no sound, give away no sign of our presence when we move unless we walk into something. You do not even stir as I leave.

There are more of them waiting outside. The doctor is there, a continual presence, and the one in the flowered dress, but others, too, two men who stare with the same avid longing in their eyes. 

No. They can’t have you.

The doctor moves forward, hand outstretched. “Wwwarm,” she purrs, reaching, grabbing, _aching_ for it, for the heat of your life, you energy, everything that makes you so much _more_ than we could ever be. 

I move to intercept her, stand between you and the rest of them. “No,” I say, sharp and fierce, not just to her but to the rest of them as well. “Mmine.”

Her hand stops, blocked by my chest, fingers splayed wide. “Uh-lllive,” she moans, staring with eyes that ache with need. “Wwwarm.”

“ _Mine_ ,” I snarl, glaring at her, baring my teeth. I would fight them, if I had to, to keep you. I will not let _any_ of them take you from me.

She watches, lips curling up in a facsimile of a smile, and her fingers clutch at the fabric of my suit.

“Wwwarm,” she says again, staring right into my eyes.

\---

Travis jerked awake with a start, hand going for the gun in his lap. He didn’t know what woke him—everything was the same as it was when he’d fallen asleep, far as he could tell. The old couple was still sitting on the bench outside, Wes was still sitting on the bed doing his creeper act, there was a bag on the table—

Travis stared at the bag, running a hand over his mouth. “Okay, this is just… I am getting way too complacent here.” He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, but the last time Wes went out for food it took him at least two hours to get back. Travis hadn’t even noticed him leave this time.

His ankle felt better, _stronger_ when he stood and moved to the table. “In the settlement I wake up if someone three doors down coughs,” he complained, pulling open the bag. A can of peaches, and more noodles. Well, he certainly wasn’t combining _those_ two.

“But here I am,” he ranted, pulling out the can of peaches. Now, he was certain he’d grabbed that knife from the kitchen last night… “Here I am, falling asleep in front of a corpse, completely exposed and vulnerable, ready to be _eaten_. What is _wrong_ with me?” Ah, there was the knife. He stabbed it into the lid of the can, cutting off the top. “Not that you’re not a perfectly nice corpse, but it’s the _principle_ of the thing, you know?”

Wes blinked, slow and steady, his normal conversant self.

Travis stabbed a peach with the tip of the knife and held it over the can, letting syrup drip down. “Ah, well,” he mused, sitting back in the chair. “At least you got me food. Thanks for that, by the way.”

It was still rather unnerving, Wes sitting there still as stone, staring and staring and not saying anything.

Travis was getting used to it.

(Adapt and survive, that’s all this was. All he’d ever done.)

He finished off the peaches in quick order. To be fair, it wasn’t a very large can, and this was the first thing he’d eaten since last night. And it wasn’t like he could _save_ any leftovers. He was just being expedient here. The noodles he would save for later, whenever he needed them.

He gave the knife a quick rinse in the bathroom, waving it around to let it dry. He wasn’t going to risk wiping it on any of the towels in there—he could literally _see_ the edges where pieces of terrycloth had rotted off.

“Okay,” he chirped brightly, emerging from the bathroom. Wes stared at him. Travis grinned and put his hands on his hips. “So what do you do for fun around here?”

\---

Fun.

I don’t…

_bright green grass, dark brown soil staining my fingers, and oh, the bright, bright green grass_

Is that fun? I don’t remember. But there’s a sense of…of…I don’t know the words, can’t describe it. It’s like standing in warm sunshine, like tender, unfettered smiles, like joy and peace and _life_. 

“Gr-een,” I get out. I can remember the color, so bright against my hands, and this…

This is the closest thing I have to what you want.

You sighs, rub your face. “Green. There we go with the colors again.” You pause, mutters to yourself, “Don’t know what I was thinking, asking a _corpse_ …”

You shake your head and look up, eyes burning bright. “Right. That’s fine. We can make our own fun.” You get your gun, your stuff, and move towards the door. The smile you make is so blindingly bright, full of energy and— _fun_.

“We’re gonna go exploring.”


	2. Middle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are different now; Travis has to get home and tell them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also posted on FF.net on 11.15.16.

_“Wake me up if everything changes, and nothing’s what it seems._  
_Come raise the dead—I’m dreaming of the end.”_  
_—Rachel Rabin, “Raise The Dead”_

\---

The hotel was…well, it was a hotel. All the rooms were identical, some pristine, untouched since they’d been abandoned, dust a mile thick over every surface; others were a mess, torn apart by the elements or human hands or possibly even corpses, who knew. 

There weren’t many personal effects lying around. Travis supposed most people would have grabbed everything they could carry when they tried to outrun the dead. But he found a few: a pair of sunglasses, one lens cracked; a paperback copy of a dime-store novel, left on a nightstand, worn by the elements until even the cover was illegible; a prescription pill bottle, sitting unattended in the bathroom. (That last one, Travis snagged and held it out for Wes to see, figuring with the corpse’s infatuation with colors the bright orange plastic would be a draw. Wes looked at the bottle, frowned, and turned away. Well. Fine then.)

He avoided any of the higher levels, not trusting the look of those stairs. But the first floor was ripe pickings, and he went through everything with a relish borne of absolute boredom. Wes shuffled after him, occasionally touching something or picking something up, but mostly he just stared at Travis and didn’t blink nearly enough. Travis was almost getting used to the prickly feeling on the back of his neck.

There wasn’t much to find. He got through all the rooms on the first floor within two days.

“Well,” he muttered, standing at the end of the hallway, looking out the window. “Don’t know what I was expecting, really.” There was nothing to find. Had he hoped for something? Or had he just been trying to distract himself? He wasn’t sure anymore.

There was a clatter behind him. He turned, expecting Wes, but there was no one in the hall. Travis blinked.

Another clatter, off to the left, and when he looked over he saw a face, pressed against the tiny window of the stairwell. The corpse was staring right at him, mouth moving silently, fingers scrabbling at the pane of glass.

Travis’s first, instant response was to go for his gun, bring it up and aim—

And then he thought about Wes. About all the little thoughts he’d been having these past three—four? he’d lost track, somewhere in there—days.

Little thoughts like _What if we were wrong_ and _Maybe there’s more to it than we know_ , and he slowly lowered his gun.

The corpse was still staring at him, bumping the door. Travis swallowed, holding his gun at his side—not holstering it, no way—he might be changing his opinion but he wasn’t _stupid_. Carefully, he reached out, pulling it open an inch. Then he leapt back, because really, he _wasn’t_ stupid. He’d gotten this far by checking corners and not doing ridiculous things that might get him killed.

(Then again, letting a corpse into the hallway with him instead of filling it full of bullets was probably one of those ridiculous things that might get him killed. He knew many, many people back in the city who would say he’d lost his mind, simply because he didn’t shoot on sight.)

The corpse stumbled into the hallway, almost crashing into the opposite wall. Travis took a few more steps back, just in case, and licked his lips. “Hello?”

The corpse turned, unblinking eyes riveted on him. This guy looked…a bit more _dead_ than Wes, skin a little more decayed. The side of his neck was exposed—literally, skin peeled away to show rotted, oozing musculature beneath. Travis swallowed.

“Hi. How ya doin’? I’m Travis.”

The corpse groaned, shuffling towards him. And Travis _really_ wanted to give this guy a chance, but he couldn’t help himself; he shuffled back another step, grip tightening on his gun.

“Are you…” He took a shaky breath. “Are you still in there?”

Wes was still in there. Wes had a weird fascination with Travis’s eyes and went out and got him food. Travis didn’t know how, but there was still something there. He was starting to believe that was true for all of them.

He was at least willing to give it a chance.

The corpse paused, head tilted to the side, just like Wes did. Travis smiled, a little nervous and a little relieved. “Hey. Hi. How’s it going?” This. This was promising.

The corners of the corpse’s mouth rose, the same sort of awful rictus Wes had given him a few times. Travis exhaled loudly, shoulders dropping half an inch. “Well, that’s great—”

The corpse grinned, and then the corpse lunged, and Travis realized his mistake a second too late.

He tried to get his gun up, but—damn, these bastards were _fast_ when they were hunting. His hand made it halfway up and then the corpse was on him, and the gun went scattering as he tried desperately to keep those gnashing teeth from his face. He let out a yell as the corpse’s weight and momentum sent him sprawling, writhing like a fish as he pushed the monster away.

There was a roar, and then—from the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of grey, and hands grabbed the corpse, dragged it off him with strength Travis hadn’t expected. The corpse went flying, slamming into the wall, and Travis had a glimpse of Wes, snarling, fingers crooked into claws, brimming with that terrifying, cat-like grace.

Wes lunged with another roar, moving with all the speed of a hunting corpse, and Travis’s stomach dropped. He scuttled back, hands groping at his sides for his gun, unable to tear his eyes away from the two corpses fighting.

A distant part of him, one that _wasn’t_ terrified by the spectacle before him, mused that he was probably the first person who’d ever seen something like this, two corpses fighting each other. It was always humans vs. corpses—after all, if corpses were just mindless monsters, what could they possibly have to fight over?

The rest of him, the part that _was_ actually terrified, was just sort of shrieking in fear, which wasn’t particularly helpful.

As he watched, the other corpse lunged for Travis again, completely ignoring Wes. Wes snarled, a sound that turned Travis’s spine to jelly, ducking in front of the corpse. The corpse snarled right back, hands clawing at Wes, teeth gnashing, and Travis flinched when those teeth sunk deep into Wes’s shoulder as though it was his own flesh being bitten.

Wes didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to notice, just growled and pushed, his own teeth bared, and—oh, _oh_ , that was disgusting, Wes just chomped right down on the corpse’s neck. There was a spurt of black-red blood, and Travis’s stomach heaved unpleasantly.

It wasn’t enough to stop the corpse, of course. Only one thing could stop a corpse, and Travis was pretty sure Wes didn’t have the fine motor ability to put a bullet through the corpse’s eyes. Where the hell was his gun?

He didn’t dare look away from the fight to find it.

The two corpses separated, and it was a gruesome sight, both their mouths and chins covered in dark blood. The other corpse tilted its head (like a dog, Travis thought hysterically, curious and sweet like a dog), and then it lunged to the left, and Wes followed, but it was a feint, _corpses could feint wasn’t that awesome to know_ and it was past Wes, and Wes grabbed for it but it was gone, moving for Travis, and Travis—and Travis—

With a shout, he scrabbled at his ankle, yanked his backup pistol from the holster, and pulled the trigger, pulled and pulled and pulled until the gun clicked empty, and still he pulled, hollow clicks echoing in his ears as the corpse loomed over him.

The corpse’s teeth were still stretched tight in a snarl, eyes fixed on Travis.

But there was one shot, right above its left eyebrow, dripping black-red blood, and slowly, it toppled over. Travis scrambled to get out of the way.

He thought his heart was going to leap right out of his chest. His hands were shaking, and it took two tries to release the pistol. Slowly, he sat up, and oh, it wasn’t just his hands, it was his entire body that was shaking. Good to know.

He looked over at Wes. The corpse was hunched on all fours, gasping, a harsh wheeze that sounded like it hurt. And it was…there was something…

“Wes?” Travis called hesitantly, and Wes’s head snapped around, eyes wild, no sign of the thoughtful, slow-moving intelligence he’d seen so much of these past few days. This was a feral thing, a mindless killing machine, and when he moved, it was with a grace Travis had only seen in hunting corpses.

Travis’s heart stopped. “Wes?” he called again, voice cracking halfway through the word.

His backup pistol was empty, and he didn’t have his gun.

( _Corpses don’t feel_ , Captain always said. _Corpses don’t think. They just attack, and kill_.)

If Wes attacked him, he was a dead man.

\---

cold

so cold, can’t feel, can’t remember, can’t—

_need_ , hungry, aching, neverending need need need

“Wes?”

_life_ , hot vibrant pulsing, need want crave, devour _take_ swallow it down and make it my own

“Wes?”

A crack in your voice, a tremble, _fear_ , and I—

_“i don’t know what’s happening” she says and her voice trembles, shakes, cracks with fear, and i take her hand and say “we’ll be okay if we stick together”—_

fear in your voice, in your body, shining from your eyes

_blue eyes, blue like the sky_

“Wes? I really hope you’re in there, man, because I _really_ don’t want you to eat me, okay, we had a pretty good thing going where you _didn’t eat me_ , I really liked that—”

Your voice, high and thready, fear ( _heart pulsing pumping pounding, rich hot blood_ ) and your _eyes_

bright shining blue blue _blue_ bright as the sky hot as flame fire fire burning bright 

_i know you_

“—and if you ate me then I’d feel bad and you’d feel bad and none of us want that, no one wants to feel bad because it totally _sucks_ , right, so—”

Your voice washes over me, thin and panicky, fearfear _fear_ , and I close my eyes and fight, push down the hunger, drag it down. If I give in then you’ll be dead and gone—or worse, you’ll end up like _me_ , and everything that makes you beautiful will be _gone_.

fight it, push it down, don’t give in. I am stronger than this.

“—so maybe you could just, you know, _not eat me_ , I’d really appreciate that—”

I open my eyes. You’ve moved, crawled back, but you freeze when I look at you. You swallow, loud in the quiet ( _i can hear your heart racing_ )

“Wes?”

I move towards you, reach out. You flinch, eyes wide and afraid, and you shudder under my touch.

“Wes?” you say again, still so afraid—but also something else.

Wes. A name, _my_ name, you named me and claimed me _i remember you_

I cup your face, drag my thumb over your cheek, so bright, so blue, blue like the sky, so clear it hurts to look at…

“Buh…loo…” I groan, and you smile, shaky and nervous.

“That’s right, sky blue, just like you like.”

I lean in, press my forehead to yours. You freeze, eyes wide, uncertain ( _I know you know these eyes_ ) but I can still feel your breath on my face, warm, full of _life_.

I squash the last vestige of hunger(ache _need_ ) down, and close my eyes.

“Tr…a…vs.”

You laugh, hysterical, and say, “Close enough.”

Your hand comes up, wraps around my hand on your cheek, and where you touch me, I feel warm.

\---

Travis had never before been so close to a corpse, not without it trying to eat him. That’s what he’d thought Wes was trying to do, when he reached for him.

But Wes was just…close. Intimately close, really, and Travis thought he ought to be a bit uncomfortable with that, but he was coming down off the adrenaline and feeling awkward about their proximity was just. So outside his scope right now.

He let out a slow breath, pulling back. Wes stared, so close, and he swore those icy eyes were thawing even as he watched. Thought he could see something like _emotion_ in Wes’s gaze.

_Emotion_ , not that feral, wild hunger. Travis could live with that

Travis could _live_ , thank god.

He chuckled, no mirth in the sound, exhaustion tugging at his brain. “I think we’ve had enough fun for the day.” He eased himself to his feet, holding out a hand. “Come on, let’s go back.”

Wes stared at the outstretched hand, then slowly slid his own into Travis’s.

He collected his fallen gun before they left, grimacing to himself. He’d wasted all six bullets in his backup—that left four. Four bullets to get all the way back to the settlement.

And his ankle hurt. He must have wrenched it again when he fell.

Awesome.

They limped back to Wes’s hotel room, and Travis gratefully sank into the chair, stretching his legs out in front of him. Through half-lidded eyes he watched as Wes sat stiffly on the end of the bed, black-red blood oozing thickly, staining the front of his suit jacket—

Travis sat bolt upright. “You’re hurt!”

Wes blinked, gave his shoulder a dismissive glance, and zeroed in on Travis. “You’re…hhhurt?” he echoed back, gaze moving down Travis’s body.

“No, I’m fine. But you—” Travis pushed himself up, despite the exhaustion clinging to him, crossing the room and reaching for Wes’s shoulder before he could think too deeply about it. “He tore a chunk out of your shoulder!”

Carefully, he peeled Wes’s jacket off, grimacing at the mangled flesh. “Aw, geez.” Energy pumping now that he had something to focus on other than how close he’d come to being _eaten_ , he undid the buttons of Wes’s shirt with deft hands, pulling it off Wes’s shoulder too.

“God, how many layers are you wearing?” he grumbled, picking at the stained undershirt that had probably started life as white, however many years ago Wes put it on. “Come on, let’s get all of this off.”

Wes was, unsurprisingly, completely unhelpful in clothing removal, but Travis had helped out a few times in the medical tent back in the city—they all did their parts, helping out where needed—so it was quick work to strip Wes of his clothes. Travis wadded up the stained clothing and tossed it on the bed; Wes sat there in his pants, watching Travis blankly.

“Okay. Just sit there for a minute.” He racked his brains for everything he’d learned in the medical tent—then rationally reminded himself that it was pretty much all crap. After all, it wasn’t like Wes needed antibiotics or anything. That was one unexpected bonus to already being dead—Wes didn’t need to worry about an infection, including the one that turned people into walking corpses.

In the bathroom, Travis found the washcloth with the least amount of rot and grime and wet it under the faucet. When he came back, Wes hadn’t moved.

Travis stood in between Wes’s knees, exhaled slowly, and started wiping the thick blackish blood away. Once, Wes’s shoulder jerked under his hands, and he paused, pulling the washcloth away. “Did that hurt?”

Wes gazed up at him blankly. “No.”

“Right. Stupid question.” He went back to his task.

Wes seemed content to sit there, but Travis had never been good with silence. “So,” he said, “Why did he… Why was he…” He frowned, tried to figure out exactly what he was trying to ask. “Why wasn’t he like you?”

Wes dropped his gaze, head bowed. “T-too. Fffar.”

Travis waited. When Wes didn’t elaborate, he prompted, “Too far?”

“Gone,” Wes said simply. “T-too fffar. Gone. N-not e…nough. Inside.” His face shifted, twisted a little, like he was searching for the words. Finally he gave up, pressed his hand against his stomach and repeated, “Not e— _nough_.”

“You know, that actually makes sense.” Wes was dead. But Travis got the feeling that Wes wasn’t _completely_ dead—his body had stopped but his mind was still active, still intelligent, could still think and reason and maybe even feel. The guy out there was just…a little deader inside.

Not enough inside to keep him alive. Too far gone.

It made perfect sense.

He wiped the rest of the blood away, exposing the torn skin beneath. “Damn,” he muttered sympathetically. If Wes was human, he’d need stitches and, like, a month of light duty. As it was, he probably didn’t even need bandages.

Then he moved his gaze from Wes’s shoulder. “Jesus. Look at you.” His fingers skated over a jagged scar under Wes’s ribs, trailed along a line up his collar, traced the edges of a ragged star of puckered skin. Wes’s torso was littered with scars; his back wasn’t much better. It was a wonder his jacket and shirt weren’t tattered rags hanging off him.

“Tough life being dead,” he said, half-joking, but of course Wes didn’t laugh.

“Traaa—visss,” Wes whispered, reaching out, long fingers closing over Travis’s wrist. “T-too—fffar.”

Travis blinked. “What? No, Wes, you’re not—you’re not too far.” Wes wasn’t anywhere near the corpse in the hall. No way.

“No.” Softly, forcefully. Wes’s other hand reached out, touching the butt of his holstered gun. Carefully, clearly, he looked Travis dead in the eye and said, “Too. Far. Gone.”

Travis went cold. “No. No, _no_.” He swallowed, wanted to back up but Wes’s grip on his wrist, light as it was, kept him frozen in place. “God, _Wes_ , no…”

“Don’t w-wwwa-” Wes took a moment, gathered the words that always had so much trouble coming out. “I d-don’t wwwant. To be. G-gone.”

Tears in his eyes, Travis shook his head. “Wes. Wes, please don’t ask me that.”

Wes reached up, looking—god, looking so gentle for a brain-eating corpse, fingers sweeping under Travis’s eye, fingertips cold on Travis’s skin. “Traaa-vis,” he said, in a near-whisper. “Puh- _lease_.”

“I c—I ca—” The words lodged in his throat, came out stuttering and shaky, the way they did for Wes. With a small sound, he wrenched himself free, almost tripping over himself in his haste to back away. Wes watched him passively, gaze so goddamn gentle, and Travis couldn’t take it anymore.

He fled to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him, and clasped his hand over his mouth and tried desperately not to cry.

\---

My hands fall into my lap as you leave, and I don’t move, staring at my fingers. I am dead—I am _dead_ , I think, but I do not want to _end_. To lose my memories, fragmented as they are, my thoughts, the vague, half-formed sensations that I think may be _feelings_ , to lose even my small sense of self… No, no, I don’t want that at all.

There are others like me, I suspect, others who have not quite lost their sense of self. The doctor, she is still here, and the girl in the flowered dress. We are the ones who have not given up on who we were _before_ , despite the long passage of time.

The others, like the one in the hall, they gave it up. They let it slip away, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but the hunger and the need.

I don’t want that. I want to be _more_ than that.

But if I were to fall that far, I want you to shoot me. Protect yourself. Keep yourself safe.

And if my last vision was of your eyes, as bright and blue as the sky used to be, then that wouldn’t be such a bad way to go.

\---

He pulled himself together, eventually, and he didn’t shed a tear. He’d lost too many tears over the years, and there was no time for it now. Not now. Maybe when he got back behind the wall, when he could hide himself in his room and cry and cry and cry for the world they’d all lost…

But not now.

He did a quick inspection of his body while he was in here, stripping down and looking himself over with quick efficiency, just to make absolutely certain the corpse didn’t actually manage to bite him. They had a guy, once, who’d been so hopped up on adrenaline he hadn’t even realized he’d been bitten until they’d made it back to the settlement. That was back in the early days, when they were still working out how to deal with this thing. It would never happen like that now.

He was clean. He hadn’t gotten bitten.

Just to stall a little bit longer, he pulled out his gun and checked his math. His hands shook a little as he did so; he ignored it.

Four bullets, just like he thought. No way was he getting home with four bullets, unless a fucking _miracle_ happened.

Maybe the miracle was Wes, the corpse that didn’t act like a corpse, who’d looked Travis in the eye and asked him to shoot—

Travis squeezes his eyes shut and clenched his jaw and put away his gun with a tremor in his hands.

“Pull yourself together, Marks,” he snapped at his reflection. “You’ve survived a goddamn apocalypse. You can fucking get through this.”

His reflection stared back, brimming with a self-possession he wasn’t sure he felt. It would have to do.

He straightened, took a breath, and exited the bathroom.

Wes hadn’t moved. Travis wasn’t surprised in the slightest. He turned to look at Travis as he emerged, but other than that he was as statue-still as a corpse could be. Travis crossed the room, stood in front of Wes, and tried not to think about what happened just a few minutes ago.

“Looks like the bleeding’s stopped,” he said, and he was pleased at how his voice only shook a little bit. “Let’s get your clothes back on.”

In quick order, Wes was back in his shirt and suit jacket, the undershirt tossed in the corner for garbage. When the last button was fastened, Wes’s hands settled in his lap, and Travis collapsed in his chair, staring blankly out the window.

The silence between them was as cold and dead as the man on the bed.

Travis had never done well with silence.

“I had a friend,” he said softly, watching the old couple that sat outside the hardware store. “Paekman. I mean, his name was David, but everyone…everyone called him Paekman. He was my best friend.”

He swallowed hard, hands fisting in his lap. “We were…we were on a raid. It was simple, something we’d done a hundred times. But something went wrong and he—he was.” Travis had to close his eyes and swallow again, trying to keep his composure. Unlike a human listener, who would offer some vague sympathy, Wes merely sat there, watching him blankly with those icy eyes.

It was oddly reassuring.

“He was bit,” Travis whispered, looking out the window but seeing a scene long past. “And when we found it, he asked me—asked me to—” He exhaled slowly. “And I didn’t. I couldn’t. I should have, but I couldn’t. That bastard Crowl did. Didn’t even hesitate, just put a bullet between Paekman’s eyes.”

Softly, distantly, he whispered again, “I should have…”

It had been…it had been Paekman’s dying wish, hadn’t it? The last request of a dead man, to die at the hand of a friend. And Travis hadn’t been able to do it.

Paekman had been bitten. He’d been _bitten_ , but what if he’d turned into a corpse like Wes? Dead on the outside, but still alive inside, still _there_ , what if he hadn’t had to _die_ —?

_No_. Travis gave himself a hard shake of the head, gritting his teeth against the way his stomach churned at the thought. No, he couldn’t think like that. He’d lost too many people over the course of the years. If he went down that path he’d drive himself mad.

All he could do was keep looking forward, keep moving forward. The past would be there in his nightmares.

“I’ll do it,” he declared, turning back to the room, to the corpse on the bed. “I’ll shoot you, if I have to. If you get too far gone.” The last request of a dead man, and he’d failed Paekman—he couldn’t do that again. He couldn’t live with himself. 

He twisted in the chair, turning fully to face Wes. “But you have to do something for me,” he snapped, and he didn’t know if it was the tone of his voice or his words that made Wes’s head come up so quickly, that icy gaze boring right through him. Travis met it head on, not flinching.

“What you need to do for me, Wes, is not get that far gone.” He rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands together, holding so tight his knuckles were practically white. “I don’t know what makes you different. But whatever it is, you hold onto it and you don’t let go.” Travis blinked back the tears that threatened to fall, glowering fiercely at the corpse on the bed. “You hold on like your life depends on it. Don’t make me shoot you, Wes.”

For a long moment, Wes didn’t move, and Travis was afraid he simply…didn’t understand, that the concept was too strange and abstract for someone dead to grasp. He wasn’t entirely certain that what he was asking for would make sense to someone living, let along someone who’d already lost so much of himself.

But then Wes blinked. His hands slowly curled into fists in his lap, and he nodded, his gaze never leaving Travis’s, and Travis felt something inside of him unwind.

Maybe Wes didn’t understand entirely. Travis wasn’t certain he himself did.

But Wes understood enough.

“Okay.” Travis stood, found the discarded washcloth and headed for the bathroom. “Now that that’s settled, let’s wash your face, because I’m gonna have enough nightmares as it is, and no offence, buddy, but you look like something out of a horror movie.”

The joke did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest, but that was okay. Travis was good at pretending.

\---

You take the bullets out of your gun.

“I’ve had nights like these,” you explain, setting the bullets on top of the table. “It’s not…Let’s just say there have been some incidents and leave it at that. Rather not shoot you by accident, you know?”

The grin you make is fragile and small. I try to grin back, to offer reassurance, but you don’t look reassured.

“Anyway,” you say, “Night,” and you curl up in the chair.

As has become my habit, I watch you sleep.

Hold on, you said, to what makes you different. Different from the other corpse, from all the ones who are too far gone. Hold on, don’t let go.

You don’t understand how difficult that is. There is so very little _left_ , fragments of a person long dead. Some scattered memories here and there, the occasional sensation of… I don’t know how to describe it, _something_ , deep inside, something strange and new and so very familiar.

There had been a stirring earlier, when I heard you yell. It had run through me, both hot and cold at once, a flash of—of—

So many things I’ve forgotten. I don’t even have a word for the feeling.

_Feeling_. 

Emotion.

Oh.

I close my eyes, thinking back. Trying to remember. A feeling so strange, but in the most familiar way. What was it…

And suddenly I am there, in the hall, tearing the corpse away from you, biting into its neck, acrid blood dripping down my face. The corpse lunges to the side, and I move to follow, but it is not there—it is going the other direction, it is moving past me, and I turn but I am too slow, too slow—

You bring your gun up, fear wild in your eyes, and pull the trigger.

It clicks, empty. You took the bullets out.

And then the corpse is upon you, biting you, tearing into your flesh, and you scream. With a strength I did not know I possessed, I tear the corpse from you, tear its head clean off its neck and toss it away.

But it is too late. Already your eyes are dimming, emptying, the blood from your wounds turning sluggish and dark, and you look up with hunger in your eyes.

My eyes snap open, and I fling myself upright, a gasp tearing through my throat. I don’t need to breathe—another time, this would be fascinating, the odd feel of air moving through lungs that have not needed oxygen in so many years.

I do not spare a thought for myself, for the strangeness of breathing after such a long absence. My attention is only for you, my eyes seeking your shape in the dimness of the room. You are still curled in the chair, twitching fitfully in sleep, but it is not enough. I need to see your eyes, I need to _know_ —

I rise, move towards you, lean over you. This close, I can feel your heat, the vibrancy you exude. _Life_ , such a strange and wonderful thing.

I can feel you, and I—it is like gasping, but in the opposite direction, a steady exhale on a tide of easing, something painful and sharp suddenly gone.

A sigh of relief. That is what it is called. A different kind of breath.

This, too, there is no time to examine, for the movement of air across your face startles you, and your eyes snap open (your eyes, your beautiful eyes, blue and bright and whole, not dim and empty of life).

You let out a shout, gun snapping up, pulling the trigger, but there are only empty clicks.

Now I understand the wisdom in removing the bullets.

I step back, away, retreat. I am halfway across the room before your eyes focus, seeing… _me_ , not whatever phantasm lurked in your mind.

“Wes?” You sit up, eyes wide, fear a sharp, sour tang on your skin. “What the _hell?_ Why are you just standing over me like a fucking creep, man?”

Your voice shakes, heart racing. (Fear. Fear. Fear.)

I sit on the bed and say nothing. To explain the visions in my mind, when the words would come out disjointed and wrong… No. Better to say nothing at all than to have you misunderstand.

You mutter to yourself, sink back into your chair. The gun stays firmly in your lap, your finger on the trigger, aimed at nothing. There is nothing in this room that will hurt you.

I won’t hurt you.

You say nothing else. Before long, your eyes droop, and your body relaxes. It is not a comfortable sleep, not a restful sleep. But it is sleep.

I keep watch, unwilling to take my gaze from you. The last time I did, you died, right before me. It wasn’t real—the evidence is here, asleep in the chair, proof that my mind conjured my own phantoms for me.

But it was real enough, and I have no wish to relive it.

_Nightmares._

What a terrible, awful thing.

\---

Travis felt like shit.

“I feel like shit,” he announced to the world at large.

The world in question gave him a slow, lazy blink and tilted his head to the side.

“I do,” he said, tearing a few new strips from the sheets and rewrapping his ankle. Falling yesterday certainly hadn’t done him any favors. “I feel like absolute shit, Wes. My head hurts and my ankle hurts and I’m pretty sure I didn’t sleep for more than five minutes last night.”

Wes made a small sound, and when Travis glanced up the corpse’s eyebrows had furrowed in the middle of his forehead. “Y—ou’re…hhhurt?”

The concern was…sweet. Completely not what he wanted right now in the middle of his epic bitchfit, but sweet nonetheless. Travis sighed and tied off his ankle, giving Wes a vague smile. “I’m fine, Wes. I’m not hurt.”

Well, that kind of put a damper on the bitching. _Lame_. Huffing, Travis quickly reloaded the bullets in his gun, holstered it, and headed for the door.

Wes was there in an instant, darting across the room with that _speed_ , and Travis’s throat went tight, he flinched back a step and dropped his hand to his gun, heart pounding in his ears, and his ankle twinged warningly beneath him, threatening to send him crashing to the floor where the corpse would lunge at him, pin his down and bite him, _eat_ him—

But the corpse didn’t attack. Wes merely stood in front of the door, not so much as a twitch in Travis’s direction. Travis swallowed hard, and took a few deep breaths, trying to calm his racing heart.

“Wes?” he says after a few minutes, once he’d calmed down enough to actually ask calmly instead of maybe freaking out a little.

“No,” Wes responded softly, eyes boring into Travis’s, and Travis didn’t even need Wes to say any more, he knew exactly how this conversation was about to go, word for word. They’d had it the first day.

“Wes,” he said gently, softening his tone. “I shot him. I _killed_ him. He’s not going to hurt me.”

It was funny. Wes’s face didn’t shift, and his tone was just as soft as before when he repeated, “No.”

But Travis swore he was radiating just the most stubborn vibes in the universe.

“Okay, you want to know what’s really not safe? Me with cabin fever. I was stuck in the infirmary tent once and Jonelle threatened to sedate me if I didn’t settle down. And it’s not like we have drugs to waste so that was kind of a big thing.”

Travis hadn’t really expected that to work, but he was still mildly disappointed when it didn’t.

“No,” Wes said for the third time, and maybe it was the repetition that injected a touch of desperation into the words. “Not s-aaafe.”

Travis simply gave Wes a small, sad smile and agreed.

“It’s really not.”

\---

You agree. You smile an empty smile and your eyes are flat and empty (like a nightmare, and something in my chest clenches painfully) and you agree.

The agreement, I think, means that you’ll go back to your chair and sit down.

You do not. Instead you blink, and smile, and this one, while as stiff as the smiles I attempt to give you, at least reaches your eyes. “But that doesn’t mean we hole up and hide away!” you say brightly, smacking your hand against my shoulder. And then you move past me, to the tiny closet right inside the doorway, and I am left standing there, staring at the space you’d been.

The strange thing is, I don’t even think I’m that surprised. You are always moving, unable to keep still—no matter how dangerous, sitting safe in a room isn’t something you’d do easily.

It’s really rather frustrating. How am I supposed to keep you safe (keep you _mine_ ) if you insist on throwing yourself out there?

There’s a mighty tearing, crashing sound. I turn and find you standing triumphant, the curtain rod in your hands, torn from the cracked walls. “Nice, huh?” you say, looking at the shiny piece of metal appreciatively. “I can use it as a walking stick, _and_ , if anything comes at me again, I can whack it a couple of times and put it down without wasting any more bullets. Pretty innovative, huh?”

And you grin, eyebrows moving on your head. “Come on, Wes. This is gonna be fun!”

Considering the last thing you said was fun almost got you killed, I am wary, at best.

But I don’t have the words to express my concerns, and I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t listen to them anyway.

So I merely sigh softly to myself and follow you into the hall.

\---

Travis was a man on a mission. He walked down the hall with confidence, with purpose, heading straight for the stairwell the other corpse came out of yesterday. When Wes realized where they were going, he made a little sound in his throat, something between a moan and a growl. Travis ignored the way it sent the primal parts of his brain scurrying for safety and said over his shoulder, “Keep up, Wes, we got a long day ahead of us!”

The corpse was still where it had fallen, no one to take the body away after Travis’s bullets dropped him. Travis swallowed hard and didn’t let himself look down as he stepped over the body. He’d had enough nightmares last night. Looking would only give him one more.

He heard Wes pause, heard another little moan-growl, but he didn’t look back.

The stairwell door easily opened for him. Travis paused at the base of the stairs, leaning on the curtain rod, and waited for Wes to catch up. When the corpse did, Travis grinned and pointed towards the sky.

“Shall we?”

Wes’s expression was blank, but his eyes were totally screaming _What? What the hell Travis?_

Travis just kept grinning. “We’re going up.”

Up.

For all their speed when hunting, corpses were still _dead_. They weren’t the most agile things in the first place, and they all seemed to suffer from some degree of coordination problems. Doorknobs, for instance, were impossible—get behind a locked door they couldn’t simply break down, and you were good until someone rescued you or you starved out.

Stairs were not like doorknobs. Corpses could climb stairs. Corpses just couldn’t climb them _well_. They were always told, if they were being chased by corpses and had even the slightest chance of getting away, find a set of stairs—three flights was recommended, though more was always better—and just start climbing. The corpses would slow down, unable to take the stairs at any decent speed, and odds were the corpse would get tired of chasing you and give up.

Travis hadn’t been willing to try the stairs before, but…well. Today he was on a mission.

Still grinning (and grinning and grinning, because smiling kept the nightmares at bay), Travis started climbing. “You can wait there,” he called, “Or you can follow, but I’m not waiting for you to decide.”

Wes made a very human-like sound of irritation and moved. Travis took a quick glance back; Wes was slowly working his way up the stairs, head bowed, watching his feet with the attention of a scientist.

Travis snorted quietly to himself.

He hadn’t gotten a very good look at the hotel when Wes first brought him here—he’d been dazed and kind of shocked and too (stunned, horrified, numb, all of the above) to do much sightseeing. And he hadn’t been outside since—Wes refused to let him accompany him on food runs, not that Travis particularly wanted to risk the city full of corpses, no matter his complaining.

Still, he’d have figured it was four, maybe five stories tall. It certainly didn’t look like the kind of hotel that’d be a lot taller.

He was wrong. By the fourth floor, he was exceedingly grateful he’d had the foresight to tear the curtain rod down—not only could he use it to probe each stair (which were not metal and therefore suspect) but he could also use it as a walking stick, i.e. lean more and more heavily on it the higher they went.

By the seventh floor, his ankle was seriously starting to send little warning signs at him, and he was cursing the maker of the stairs all the way back to the start of that guy’s family line.

“ _Elevators_ ,” he muttered, “You remember elevators? They were _great_. I miss elevators.”

There was no sound behind him. When he paused at the next landing and glanced back, he saw Wes had fallen half a flight behind, but was still doggedly trucking along.

Travis sighed and kept going.

When he finally came out onto the roof, he was exhausted. It’s not like he wasn’t in shape—running for his life on a daily basis kept him fit—but climbing ten fucking flights of stairs on a bum ankle after the night he’d had wasn’t an easy task. Travis sat down on the nearest thing he could find, the curtain rod laid across his lap, took the chance to catch his breath while he waited.

It was a good fifteen minutes before Wes appeared in the doorway, and for all that the guy was a corpse and had the corresponding facial expressions of a dead guy, Wes sure looked awfully annoyed. Travis just grinned and said, “Wait ‘till we have to go back down.”

If anything, Wes looked more annoyed.

_Amazing_ , Travis thought wistfully, _absolutely amazing._

He had to get back to the city, had to tell his people about corpses that could _feel_. They were _so wrong_.

His mission was even more imperative. 

He climbed to his feet with a minimum of complaining, limping to the edge of the roof. From here he could see so much of the city, sprawling before him. Ruined buildings and abandoned cars littered the streets, corpses shuffling dumbly along (no, not dumbly, not at all), but if he closed his eyes…

“It used to be beautiful,” he told Wes, staring out at the city that had been his home his entire life. “And look at it now.”

It was like sitting on the edge of the wall, looking out beyond and remembering the way things _used_ to be.

It kind of hurt, like poking the space where a tooth used to be.

He was a man on a mission, but he took a moment to just stand there.

\---

I do not remember stairs.

Perhaps if I did, I would have waited at the bottom for you to return. Instead, I started up, and I take each stair one at a time, even though you are slowly outpacing me. I cannot allow you to get too far away. The last time you were out of my sight—

( _nightmares, such a terrible, awful thing_ )

No. Even if I had remembered stairs, I would have followed you up.

And up. And up. My body is not adapted to going up stairs—every movement is slow, deliberate, attempting to get uncooperative body parts to move in specific motions. Lift the foot—higher, higher now, must crest the stair, now set it down, now shuffle forward while dragging the other foot above the edge of the stair…

It is laborious and frustrating and I really don’t understand the purpose of this journey.

You have vanished from sight by the time I reach the top of the stairs. There is a minor clenching in my chest ( _worry_ , I remember, this feeling is called _worry_ )—but it is highly unlikely that any others will attempt the stairs simply to get to you.

I emerge into the sunlight and find you sitting, waiting. You grin and rise to your feet. I do not even attempt to smile back. As you move to the edge of the roof, I turn my head, looking around. This is a view of the city I have never seen before—everything looks so much _smaller_ from this height.

Then I look up.

Oh.

_Oh._

I raise one hand toward the sky, as though if I could just reach far enough, I’d be able to grasp that pure, shimmering blue and hold it close to my chest and never let it go.

\---

Travis was a man on a mission. His goal: to get home. He could see the top of the settlement wall from here, peeks of it through the towering buildings between. He had a mild, amused thought of the superheroes he’d grown up with, who could easily traverse such a distance without ever touching the ground.

But he was not a superhero, so he had to find more mundane means.

Tearing his eyes from the wall, he turned his attention to the ground below, searching for—anything, any possible thing he could use to get safely back to the wall and all the inhabitants within. They had to _know_. He had to tell them. And he couldn’t afford to wait any longer. He’d been gone too long as it was.

There were dozens of cars and trucks abandoned on the streets, but there was no guarantee any of them would work. If he had a secure garage and the necessary materials, he could pop open the hood and check if they were still serviceable. But he didn’t, and he couldn’t risk such a task in the middle of an open street.

Frowning, Travis moved to another edge of the roof, searching, searching. He didn’t necessarily need something to get him _all_ the way to the wall. He simply needed to get part of the way there. After that, he could find something else.

Nothing on this side either. Travis shuffled to the next edge, ignoring Wes who was standing in the middle of the roof staring up at the sky. Weirdo, he thought affectionately, looking out. There was nothing, nothing, goddammit _nothing_ —no, wait? Was that…?

Travis clutched the curtain rod, leaning forward, squinting.

“No fucking way.”

In front of a dilapidated gas station, the giant yellow shell sign long fallen, sat a motorcycle. But not just any motorcycle—Travis recognized it. He’d helped his foster brother put it back together, they’d worked on it together in their off hours, restoring it as best they could until the engine puttered to life beneath their hands.

And then Jason had stolen gas and driven out of the city, and no one had seen him since.

Jason must have stopped for gas—what he’d stolen wouldn’t have been enough to get him very far. And then, while he was filling up, he must have been overcome, overwhelmed. There’d be no other reason for him to leave the bike behind.

Travis allowed himself a moment to mourn, then pushed it aside. There’d be time to grieve later. Right now he was a man on a mission.

It had been less than three months since Jason rode out of the city. The bike had been sitting here, untouched because what would corpses do with a motorcycle?

It should still work.

“Okay,” Travis whispered, tracing the path from the hotel to the gas station. “That’s a plan.”

He was going home.

\---

The sky hasn’t moved, hasn’t changed. It’s the same as it has always been.

But as you head back down the stairs, as I move to follow and the roof closes over my head…

The sky doesn’t move, but suddenly the world feels so much smaller.

\---

“I’m hungry.”

Travis didn’t know if it was very fair to call Wes predictable, considering the guy really only had one facial expression. Still, when Wes turned that blank, flat look on him, all Travis could think was, _Saw that coming._

He gave Wes his most charming grin and shuffled for the lobby. “Let’s go scrounging!”

Also completely unsurprising: Wes darting in front of him, one hand on his chest, saying a short, flat, “No.”

Travis sighed. “Come on, just a short trip?”

“No. Not s-afe.”

“Hey, that was pretty good! Hardly any stuttering at all!”

Wes’s brows furrowed a little, and Travis chose to read this look as mild annoyance. “Tra-vis.”

“No, seriously, have you been practicing? Cuz you are really getting it down.”

Wes just stared at him, intractable as a brick wall, and Travis sighed dramatically, shoulders slumping. “Fine. _Fine_. I won’t go grocery shopping with you. Okay?”

Wes gave a passable imitation of a suspicious scowl. Travis rolled his eyes and moved down the hall. “Look. I’m going back to the room. Okay, now I am _in_ the room. Now I’m shutting the door! Is that good?”

He waited a heartbeat, then poked his head through the door. Wes was still standing there; Travis waved a hand. “Go, go! I’m in the room. I’m not going grocery shopping, so _go_.”

Wes blinked, tilted his head, mouth tugging down. “S—tay,” he ordered sternly.

Travis rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” He shut the door again, leaning back against it.

Then he closed his eyes and counted—slowly—to one hundred.

Then, just to be on the safe side, he counted to two hundred.

Carefully, he eased the door open, peering into the hall. There was no sign of Wes—Travis stuck his head out a little further just to be certain, but the corpse was nowhere to be found.

From past experience, Travis knew this meant he had at least forty-five minutes to implement his plan, if not longer—corpses weren’t exactly _fast_ when they weren’t hunting.

First things first, he ventured into the hotel room, searching around the bed for Wes’s discarded undershirt. He found it on the floor by the wall, held it up and grimaced at the grimy mess of fabric. “Oh, this is gonna be disgusting,” he muttered, quickly stripping of his own shirt and jacket. His grimace only deepened as he pulled the undershirt over his head, and a couple of times he almost gagged.

“I already need seven showers,” he announced to no one in particular, easing his own clothing back on. It was disgusting, the dirty, corpse-blood-covered shirt, but it was necessary. That first day, Travis didn’t remember much, but he remembered Wes smearing blackish goo on his face, on his chest, and he remembered walking safely through a city of corpses. Somehow, Wes’s goo-blood covered up the—the smell of his own tasty human blood.

If he was going to get to Jason’s bike, he definitely needed his tasty human blood as well-insulated as possible.

The next thing he did was go into the bathroom. On top of the toilet tank was the washcloth he’d used to wipe away Wes’s blood from his shoulder bite. A little water softened the hardened mess, and in the cracked mirror Travis liberally applied the gunk to his face. _This is disgusting_ , he sang in his head, but not aloud because he didn’t want to risk getting any of it in his mouth.

In the end, the thing looking back from the mirror did not look so much like Travis Marks as it did a corpse that resembled Travis Marks.

Which was kind of the point.

Hopefully it would be enough.

He checked his gun one more time, took a breath, and stepped out of the hotel room. As quickly as he could, he made his way to the lobby, peeking out. There was a cluster of corpses outside, and Travis’s first instinct was to shoot his way through. No way to do that, though, not with only four bullets.

Time to see if his camouflage worked. 

He did feel a momentary pang of regret, and something like guilt. Wes had done so much for him these past few days, had kept him safe and fed him and protected him. Travis still didn’t understand why, but he understood that Wes had a fascination with him (with his eyes). It didn’t seem right to just _leave_ like this, without telling Wes.

But Wes wouldn’t let him go, and he _had_ to get back to the settlement. He’d already been gone so long, he couldn’t waste any more time. He had to go _now_ , while he could.

Travis took another breath, hung his arms loosely in front of him, and shuffled into the lobby. The pain in his ankle helped with that—couldn’t move too fast with it, so at least he kept in character.

(On the other hand, if his little disguise _didn’t_ work and he had to run for his life, he was so totally screwed…)

The corpses outside looked up when he came into view. There were four of them, two women and two men, and Travis recognized the one in the doctor’s coat.

She was the only one who kept watching him after the other three looked away, disinterested. There was the same sort of steady intelligence in her eyes Travis kept noticing in Wes, and somehow Travis felt like she could see right through his little disguise.

But she didn’t say anything, didn’t move toward him, didn’t so much as groan meaningfully in his direction. Travis had to hope it was good enough.

Slowly, he shuffled past the group, holding his breath when he got too close (because corpses didn’t breathe, had no need to breathe, and he definitely didn’t want to tip them off that he was different when they’d already dismissed him).

And then he was past them, and out on the street beyond, but he didn’t take the time to relish the accomplishment. He had to get to Jason’s bike, had to get back to the settlement before something went wrong.

Slowly, he shuffled down the street, moving a little quicker when there were no corpses in sight. Luckily, he was good with directions and landmarks, and he easily made it to the gas station in good time. Jason’s bike was sitting right in front of the pump, abandoned and covered in dust. For a moment, Travis simply ran his fingers through the grime, reminiscing. He and Jason had built the engine practically from the ground up, scrounging for parts whenever either one of them went on a raid, and the day they’d turned it on and heard the engine purr, neither of them could stop grinning.

Travis swung his leg over the bike, gripped the handlebars. The best thing he could do right now, in his brother’s memory, was get this bike back to the settlement and tell the people inside what he knew.

(Maybe Jason was out here somewhere. Maybe Travis could find him again, could spark that life back in Jason’s eyes, maybe he could get his brother back.)

(It was stupid to hope, but Travis couldn’t stop himself.)

The keys were still in the ignition. Whatever caught Jason, it had taken him completely by surprise.

Moment of truth. Travis held his breath and turned the key.

The engine sputtered fitfully. He gave it five seconds and tried again. It cough and sputtered again.

Third time’s the charm. He _needed_ this to work. Travis closed his eyes, said a little prayer, and turned the key.

The engine coughed—and then it caught, and the bike rumbled to life. Travis couldn’t help letting out an exhilarated whoop. 

The gas tank was half-full, more than enough to get him back to the settlement, and the bike was fast enough to keep him well out of any corpses’ hands. Travis should know, he helped build the damn thing.

Before he left, he spared one last glance at the hotel, though he couldn’t see it from here. He didn’t really have time for this—the sound of the bike engine and his own cry of delight would draw any nearby corpses over to investigate the sound. But he still stopped, still looked back.

He would come back for Wes, somehow. When he’d convinced his people of the truth, when he’d shown them how wrong they were, that there was still something left to save… Then he would come back.

But right now, he was a man on a mission, and he couldn’t lose sight of that.

Travis gritted his teeth and pumped the throttle, and the motorcycle pulled away from the gas station.

\---

When I return, the hotel room is quiet.

There is a feeling, as though an icy spike goes right through my chest. Every time I have left, you are always sitting in this room, waiting, impatient and bored. I assume you have tried to leave at least once; but it is not safe, and you would have realized that. You stayed.

And now you are not here.

Where would you have gone?

The bag of food drops unheeded from my fingers as I turn and venture into the hall. Perhaps you are in another room—perhaps you simply became bored and went exploring until I returned.

But you are not here. I move through the halls, call your name, but you do no answer.

You have gone. Somehow, you have left. You have escaped.

I kept saying it wasn’t safe. And it wasn’t.

But the truth is, I was keeping you here for me. For the blue of your eyes, for the warmth that lies deep within your chest, for the abundance of life that flows from your every motion. I kept you here for the hope that something of that warmth, that life, would fill up the empty spaces inside of me that had been hollowed out so long ago.

I kept you here, but now you are gone.

I return to the room, stepping over the abandoned bag. Food, for you—you are alive, and need sustenance different than I do. I would watch you eat, watch emotions flicker across your face, things I could barely recognize, and there would be a stirring in my stomach, hot and aching. Not hunger, I know the need of that too well. Something else.

I would watch you take pleasure in your food, and I would feel— _jealous_. I have never felt pleasure in anything I can remember eating. My food—

My food is human, and so often looked like you.

The room is empty, still. Empty and quiet and cold. I sit on the end of the bed, hands in my lap, and already I can feel the warmth of your presence leeching from my skin, dissipating in the empty space around me.

The room is empty. 

You are gone, and I feel cold.

\---

As the high walls of the settlement appeared, Travis felt a curious mix of anticipation and homesickness and dread churning in his stomach. The anticipation made sense—he couldn’t wait to see everyone again, to be welcomed home and hug his family and friends. And Randi, god, he couldn’t wait to see if Randi was there—he hoped she made it out of the botched raid alive, that she was safe inside with her dog. (He felt a twinge of guilt that this was the first thought he’d had for her since Wes took him, but, to be fair, he’d had a lot going on the past week.)

And the homesickness made sense too. After all, this _was_ his home, every paranoid inch of it. He lived here for all these years, built ties with so many people inside, and Wes was great but a dirty hotel room wasn’t a _home_. _This_ was home.

The dread was a bit more confusing. After examining it for a while, Travis decided he was probably just worried about bringing this new information about the corpses to a bunch of people who had fanatically hunted the corpses down for years. Even if they _did_ believe him (which he wasn’t counting on without a _lot_ of arguing), it wasn’t going to be an easy transition.

But he had to try. He _had_ to. 

It was just starting to get dark as he came into view, the pink-grey haze of twilight settling over the city. Good thing he’d left when he did—an hour later and the gates would be locked up tight, everyone safe inside. No one had guard duty during the night when the corpses came out in force.

As it was, the three guys on guard duty immediately brought up their weapons as he pulled the motorcycle up, and Travis groaned when he saw the man in the lead.

John fucking Crowl. Of course it was.

He stopped the bike a good fifty yards away, to show he wasn’t a threat (and to highly discourage them from shooting him on sight. _That_ would be a god-awful way to end the day.)

“Hey, Crowl,” he called brightly, climbing off the bike. He stood casually by the vehicle, hands nonchalantly at his side, pretending he _didn’t_ have three submachine guns pointed his way. “How’s it going?”

“Marks,” Crowl growled, scowling, which was pretty much his typical reaction to anything and everything. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Yeah, well.” Travis shrugged, offering up a smile. “Surprise.”

He could see one of the other guys muttering into a walkie-talkie, probably calling for the captain or reinforcements or something. Travis hoped he was calling the captain. Captain Sutton could be a hard-ass, but at least he was _reasonable_ , unlike a certain someone’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach.

Just to be on the safe side, Travis didn’t move any closer. No reason to give Crowl an excuse to shoot.

“Hey Crowl, is that a submachine gun in your hands, or are you just really happy to see me?”

Still, he couldn’t help mouthing off. It was one of his failings, really. 

Plus, it was all kinds of hilarious to watch Crowl’s face twist like that.

“Shut up,” Crowl muttered, glaring at him.

“Aw, but Johnny boy, I miss our little chats. How are you? Has that rash problem cleared up?”

Mostly, Travis couldn’t keep his mouth shut around Crowl because Crowl was a _dick_. It was probably gonna get him shot one day. Travis would go out with no regrets.

“Shut _up_.” Crowl’s finger twitched toward the trigger. “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.”

“Oh come on, Crowl. You think I’m infected? I drove a motorcycle here. Do you honestly think a corpse could have enough coordination to manage _that?”_ Wes could barely make it all the way up the stairs, and he was one of the more cognizant ones. Poor guy wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a motorcycle.

“Shut. _Up_ ,” Crowl growled.

Travis rolled his eyes. “And you keep telling me to shut up, which means I’m talking, which, again, not really corpse-like. I mean, _seriously_.”

The guy on Crowl’s right shifted uneasily, looking twitchy. Deitz, Travis thought his name was. Not someone he had a lot of contact with in the settlement. “Could be newly infected,” he muttered, just loud enough to hear.

The other guy, one of Crowl’s buddies—Prince or Pierce or something—added, “Got all that gunk on his face.”

“It’s not _mine_ , for god’s sake.”

Crowl shifted, silencing the other two and still glaring furiously at Travis. “Shut up until the captain gets here.”

Oh good. The captain was coming. Maybe Travis wouldn’t get shot before he made it inside.

Wisely, this time Travis kept his mouth shut. 

Less than a minute later, the fortified gate slid open, and the captain stepped out. Sutton was short and stout, but he had a presence, a sense of command that made him tower. There was a spine of steel under his slightly-soft exterior, more than enough to lead even people like Crowl, who followed no rules but his own.

When he saw Travis, his eyes went wide, face paling. “Travis Marks,” he breathed, and Crowl didn’t have enough emotion capacity to be surprised, but the captain looked like he’d just seen a ghost.

Travis gave him a small smile and a little wave. “Hey, Cap.”

“Travis,” the captain said again, stepping forward. “It’s been a week. How are you here?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” Travis glanced up at the sky, which had been steadily darkening as they stood here. “Maybe I could tell it inside.”

The heavy silence made him look back down, and when he saw the captain’s face, he groaned. “Oh, come _on_ , I’m not infected! I rode a motorcycle!”

“You could have been recently infected,” Sutton said, though he didn’t sound convinced.

“That’s what I said,” Deitz muttered, and Travis shot him a glare.

“Fine. _Fine_. You want to see that I’m not infected? _Fine!”_ Quickly, with no finesse, he stripped out of his clothes, until he was standing naked in his bare feet, arms held out to his side. “Look! No bites! I’m clean! Can I _please_ come in now?”

His sudden nudity seemed to have shocked the captain into silence—the man was gaping at him with an open mouth. Deitz and Prince/Pierce/whatever wore similar expressions.

Crowl, who didn’t have a single emotion to speak of, was the only one who dared to venture closer, hand tight on his gun, eyes narrowed suspiciously. Travis turned in a slow circle, arms still held out, grinning cheekily over his shoulder. “Liking what you see, Johnny boy?”

Crowl growled softly, but turned back to the captain. “He’s clean.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed, Crowl. I’m sure you’ll find something to shoot soon.”

Sutton slowly closed his mouth, the look on his face a mix of relief and amusement. “Put your clothes on, Marks, and get inside. We’re closing up for the night.”

Travis threw him a sloppy salute and said, “Yes sir,” tossing a wink Crowl’s way. When Crowl growled again, Travis just laughed and picked up his clothes.

The end of the world necessitated haste in all things, and Travis was dressed in less than a minute. Whistling cheerfully, he grabbed the handles of his motorcycle and pushed it through the gates, smiling cheerfully at the stunned crowd just inside, watching him enter.

As the heavy gates clanged shut, Travis just couldn’t stop grinning.

It was good to be home.

\---

My hands are shaking.

They should not be doing that. I stare at them impassively, unable to find any fascination in such a novelty. You are _gone_ , and I am cold, and I find it hard to care about _anything_ , even the unusual phenomena gracing my body.

If you were here, perhaps you would tell me what it means, this shaking. Perhaps it matches this thing I’m feeling, this dull, throbbing ache in my chest, echoing between my ribs as though something is trying to get out.

I close my eyes and think about how much _easier_ it would be to just let go. To stop clinging so tightly to faded memories that only bring pain ( _dark hair blue eyes gentle smile and she laughs with such joy_ ), to stop wanting so desperately something I can never have. How much _simpler_ everything would become, if I just let go. If everything I became was hunger and need without any impossible dreams filling my head.

How much _easier_ it would be if I no longer felt _anything_.

(you are _gone_ , the heat from your hands leeched from mine, i am _so very cold_ )

_“What you need to do for me, Wes, is not get that far gone.”_

I open my eyes, staring unseeing at your chair, your voice ringing in my head. You are so sharp in my memories, so clear and vibrant, so unlike the distant, dreamy recollections of _before_.

_“I don’t know what makes you different. But whatever it is, you hold onto it and don’t let go.”_

Should I let everything go, you, I think, would be the hardest thing to release.

The other memories, faded with time and painful to touch, would be easy, but you…

(bright blue eyes, blue as the sky, i see you from afar and i am struck)

I do not think I can let you go.

_“You hold on like your life depends on it.”_

I curl my shaking hands into fists, and I hold on.


	3. End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is how they save the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also posted on FF.net under the penname 'EFAW' on 12.15.16.

_“We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.”_   
_—Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies_

\---

They shuffled him off to the captain’s briefing room, posting a guard at the door so the curious people couldn’t mob him for stories of his miraculous appearance. As much as Travis wanted to see his friends and family, he was kind of grateful for the isolation. He wanted to lay everything out for the captain first, before he went spreading stories to everyone else.

He’d been given a washcloth, which he happily used to wipe his face, and something to eat, and now he was just waiting.

Jonelle came in a few minutes after he was sequestered away, medical bag in hand. She paused in the doorway, looking at him—not even sneering, as was her wont, just looking.

And then her face got sort of pinched at the edges and she said gruffly, “I see you made it back in one piece,” which was extremely alarming because her voice was kind of tight and Travis didn’t know how to deal with this kind of emotional display from her.

Apparently she didn’t know how to deal with it either, because the next thing she said was, “Shut up, don’t say anything stupid, I have five different sedatives in my bag,” and Travis relaxed.

The door opened again while Jonelle was checking him over, and the captain entered, flanked by his top lieutenants, including Crowl. Sutton gave him a little smile, holding the door open, and said, “I think there’s someone who’d like to see you,” and in stepped—

“Randi!” Travis jumped to his feet, Jonelle’s blood pressure cuff dangling from his arm. He leapt across the room, gathering her up in a huge hug, and she sniffled against his shoulder, hugging him like she was trying to break his ribs.

“You’re okay?” he asked, then—“Of course you’re okay, _obviously_ , god, I’m so glad, I wasn’t sure if you’d made it back or not—”

“I’m fine,” she said, her words blending with his in an excited rush. “I walked home, it was the weirdest thing, the corpses didn’t even act like I was there.”

“It was the goo,” he said sagely. “I saw you, right at the end. You were covered in corpse-blood, right? Yeah, it acts like some sort of…I don’t know, it masks our scent or something, they don’t even notice you’re in the middle of them.”

Randi pulled back, gave him an appraising look. “Is that how you survived a week?” she asked, wiping her eyes.

“I think we’d all like an answer to that question, Marks,” Sutton said, already switching into Captain mode. “Why don’t you sit down and tell us?”

Travis looked around the room, at the captain, Crowl, Jonelle, Kate and Amy. He looked at Randi, gestured to the table; hesitantly, she sat. (Crowl looked like he wanted to argue, but the captain shut that down with a look.)

Travis resumed his seat, sitting back as Jonelle went back to taking his blood pressure. “Well, it’s kind of a long story. See, it started with this corpse I’d seen around the city…”

\---

I need you.

I sit, cold and empty with shaking hands, and I can’t let you go. Can’t let you just _walk away_. I need you, need your fire, your warmth, your life. I will never hurt you, but I need what you can give.

Because I have experienced warmth, and being cold again is worse than I ever realized.

I will hold on, for you. But without you, I don’t know how long I _can_ hold on.

I need you, and I can’t let you go. I _won’t_.

I rise from the bed, venture into the hall, the lobby, out the front doors. My steps are unerring, my path unwavering. I know where you have gone. We all know of the city behind the wall.

I don’t know what I will do when I arrive, but that is something to worry about later. First I must _get_ there.

They are outside again, the doctor, and the others; the girl in the flowered dress, the black man and the white. They have never paid me much attention—I am another one of them, uninteresting. But today, they turn as I step into the street, four pairs of eyes fixated on me.

It is strange, to be the object of such intense scrutiny. I understand your discomfort a little better now.

I step forward, into the street, and they swarm around me, touching. It is strange and unusual, and I find myself flinching from their touch. They lay their hands, all but the doctor, and they all murmur the same word, a low, pleased rumble.

“Wwwarm…”

I am not warm. _You_ are warm—I am cold, so cold, all the way down, your warmth leeched from me. Can’t they feel the chill inside of me?

I pull back from their grasping hands, step back until there is distance between me and them. They linger, hands reaching, but do not come any closer. Slowly, I move around them.

The doctor steps into my path, hand reaching, though she does not come close enough to touch. “Wwwarm,” she purrs, looking as satisfied as someone dead can look.

I step around her outstretched hand. “No,” I correct. “N-not me. _Him_.”

“No,” she says, just as certainly. “Wwwarm. H—ere.” And she holds her hand in front of my chest, where the dull throbbing ache is most strongly centered.

She is wrong. I am so cold, cold like I cannot remember—even before I met you, I did not feel like _this_.

Or maybe I did, and I simply didn’t _realize_ it. Being so warm makes the chill all the colder.

The doctor moves, points to the side. “Go,” she says, smiling. “T-to himmm.”

I do not need to look to know where she is pointing.

I can still feel their eyes on me as I walk down the streets, unblinking gazes fixed on my back. I do not look behind me.

I need you. I cannot hold on without you.

I do not _want_ to hold on without you.

My eyes fixed unerringly on my goal, I walk towards the city behind the wall.

\---

“Bullshit.”

Travis glared at Crowl, clenched his jaw. “Why the _fuck_ would I make something like this up?”

“Maybe you went insane out there, all alone,” Crowl sneers. “Maybe you started to _sympathize_ with them.”

Travis ignored him (it was difficult, but he managed), turned his attention to the only person who really mattered. “Captain, I swear, everything I said is true. It really happened.”

Sutton’s face was flat, hands clasped on the table in front of him. “They ruined the world, Travis,” he said softly, the sort of tone someone would use talking to a child.

Travis lifted his chin. “I know that, sir. But maybe we can fix it.”

“There’s no _cure_ for being a corpse,” Jonelle snapped, and Travis was proud he didn’t flinch. (Jonelle was scary, okay.) “People _tried_ , for a long time until they couldn’t, and there’s no way to bring them back.”

“I’m not saying we have to bring them _back_ ,” he protested. “I’m not saying we _can! ___I’m just saying that maybe there’s more to this than we thought!”

“Because corpses have brains,” Kate said sarcastically. “Because they can think and _feel_.”

“He _saved_ me, dammit!” Travis shouted, “He saved my _life!_ A corpse shouldn’t _do_ that, but he _did!”_

“Maybe he was freshly infected,” Amy offered. “Or, not fresh, but…not as far gone.”

Travis scoffed. “Trust me, if you’d seen the state of his suit, you’d know Wes was infected a _long_ time ago.”

The sudden silence in the room startled him, made him shift uneasily, looking from face to gobsmacked face.

“What?”

“Wes?” Crowl growled disbelievingly. “You _named_ it?”

And that, right there, was when Travis knew he’d lost them.

Things went downhill fast. Travis tried to get them to listen, to actually _hear_ what he was saying. They refused. Eventually, he was led out by Kate and Amy, ordered to be locked in his room with a guard on the door until they could figure out what to do. As they marched him out, he heard Jonelle say she’d try to find someone with any kind of therapy background in the city. He tried to look back, to see the captain’s face at that suggestion, but all he could see was Randi, watching him with wide eyes. He wished he could say something to reassure her.

Home was a big silver trailer, parked in an empty patch of parking lot they hadn’t found much other use for. He used to share it with Paekman, which had been…interesting, sharing something the size of a Winnebago with another person. Still, they’d made it work.

Now it was just him. As the door shut behind him, he looked around, feeling an odd moment of disorientation, as though this weren’t _really_ his home.

Then everything snapped into place, and he sighed.

Sure enough, when he checked a few minutes later, there was a guy standing at the door—not someone Travis recognized, though he offered a stiff, polite nod to Travis. He also had his hand on the butt of his gun, so Travis nodded back and closed the door. The only window big enough to fit through was in the bedroom—another guard was standing there, too, but she didn’t nod, just stared blandly at him until he closed the blinds.

Sighing again, he sat on the end of the bed and dropped his face in his hands.

He’d had a plan. It had seemed to rock-solid at the time.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

\---

The sun is rising as I approach your city, but it does not warm my skin. I pause. From here I can see all the way down the street, can see the wall that rises up and up and up, the gate barred tight, surrounding you and yours, protecting you from—

From _us_ , and those like me.

If you are there, maybe you will see me, or you will be told, and you will come out. Maybe I can tell you how much I need you, can find the words to make you understand. Maybe you won’t leave again.

If not…

Then maybe one of yours will shoot me, will end me.

I do not think I would mind too much.

I am tired of being a cold dead thing. If I cannot have you, I don’t think I want to keep going.

I start walking.

\---

The first thing he did was take a shower, which was the best thing _ever_. And climbing into fresh, clean clothes after being in the same outfit for a week was _heaven_.

Sadly, he didn’t get to enjoy the luxury for long. 

Jonelle stopped by in the middle of the night. She gave him a boot for his ankle and a pair of crutches. She also brought with her one of the teachers, a guy named Van Waals who’d apparently been a marriage counselor before the world went to shit. He was the closest thing they had to a therapist, so Travis had to sit with him for an hour listening to the old man ramble on. He himself didn’t say much, and when Van Waals left, he heard the guy telling Jonelle, “He’s being rather uncooperative.”

Money came by a little while later with a tray of food, since everything he’d had in his fridge had been scrounged after the settlement thought he was dead. His brother didn’t say anything, didn’t ask any questions about why he was under guard—he just wrapped Travis in a fierce hug and said, “Good to have you back, brother,” and Travis closed his eyes and wished he was so pleased to be back.

But eventually, Money left and Travis ate the food and there was nothing left to do but try and get some sleep.

He thought he’d just lay awake, ruminating on his utter failure, but he must have fallen asleep, because he was woken by a heavy _thump!_ from outside. He snapped awake, groping for his gun, but they’d taken that so there was nothing to grab.

Another _thump!_ , and then his front door opened. Travis had a wild thought that someone—maybe Crowl—was coming to assassinate him for his story. Crowl would be the kind of guy who’d be pissed enough to kill if he had to stop shooting corpses. He looked wildly around for something to defend himself with.

Then Randi stuck her head in the doorway and said, “Come on, Travis, hurry!” and Travis was rather glad he didn’t have a chance to grab something to hit her with.

“Randi?” He followed her out into the trailer, where she shoved a backpack at him. 

“It’s got all the canned food I have,” she told him, peering out the door. “It’s not a lot—I didn’t have time to get more.”

“Randi, what’s going on?”

“Your corpse is here. The one in the suit.” Travis’s stomach dropped. Randi gestured and slipped out. Wordlessly, Travis slipped on the backpack and followed.

“Lookout spotted him a few minutes ago,” she continued, leading the way towards the motor pool. “He’s just walking toward the wall.”

Travis’s throat went tight. “Have they—”

“No. He’s not in range.” She shot him a warning glance. “ _Yet.”_

Travis quickened his pace.

It was just starting to get light out, which meant the majority of people were still in bed. They stuck to the shadows and corners, and once Randi had to jump out and divert someone heading right for them, but otherwise they made it unaccosted. 

Travis’s bike was in the back of the lot, parked behind two jeeps, tucked here when he was whisked to the conference room probably because it was closer than his trailer. 

Travis swung his leg over the seat, gripped the handlebars, and looked at Randi.

She pulled her gun from her waistband, held it out. “Take this. And an extra mag, too, just in case.” As he accepted it, she looked toward the front gate. “Give me two minutes. I’ll have the gate open by then.”

There were so many things he wanted to say, so many things he didn’t have the words or the time for, but all he could manage was, “Why are you helping me?”

Randi paused, turned back to him. “I saw you taken, Travis,” she said softly. “I saw that corpse lead you away. I thought…I thought you were already gone.” Her lips wobbled alarmingly; thankfully, she didn’t cry. “But then you came back, a week later, completely untouched, and I…”

She bit her lip, gathered her thoughts. “If you had escaped somehow, cut your way home through a zillion corpses like Crowl thinks, then you—you wouldn’t have made up some stupid story, you would have just _said_ that. So the fact that you’re here, right now…” She sighed, shrugged a little. “Maybe there’s some truth to your story after all. And I…I want to believe there’s more to all of this than what we think we know.”

Travis was legitimately concerned that his heart was about to swell right out of his chest. Around the lump in his throat, all he could think to say was, “Thank you,” with as much sincerity as he could inject.

She gave him a small smile and nodded. “Two minutes.”

And then she was gone, and Travis wondered how he’d gotten so _lucky_ , to have a friend like her.

He counted, keeping an eye out for anyone approaching the motor pool and an ear out for any shots from the wall. So far so good.

The motor pool was fairly close to the front gate, and no one was expecting an escape attempt. Times like these, everyone was more worried about keeping the corpses _out_ , not keeping people _in_. After all, who would want to go out when there were confirmed sightings of corpses in the area?

It was the easiest thing in the world.

As he approached the gate, a few guards shouted, and a couple of them raised their guns—but he wasn’t a corpse, so they hesitated to shoot.

And then Travis was past them, zipping through the open gate and out into the street.

\---

The gates swing open, and I pause, watching. Is this you, I wonder, or is it yours, coming out to defend your city.

Either way, I will not be disappointed.

From the gate comes a vehicle; I watch it approach, tilt my head to study the figure on the back.

When I recognize you, I smile, and there is an uplifting in my chest. You are _here_. You _came_.

The vehicle slides to a stop in front of me, and you look back at the gate. “What the hell, Wes?”

“Tra—vis.”

“Yeah, hi, we can hug it out later.” You glare at me, and your eyes _blaze_ , I can almost feel the heat of your regard. “What are you even doing here?”

I open my mouth.

“No, nevermind, we don’t have time. Get on the bike.”

There are shouts from the wall, and people come out of the gate. You curse, pull a gun out. “This was _not_ how it was supposed to _go_ ,” you mutter, then give me another glare. “On the bike. Swing your leg over the seat, just like mine.”

I study your legs, try to configure it in my head. I am…uncertain how to accomplish this. Stairs were difficult. This is…

“Any time now, Wes!” you call, shooting at the men from the city. I am…confused. Why are you shooting at yours? But there is no time to ask, so I shuffle up to the—the _bike_ and do as you ask.

It is—not easy. But urgency adds fluidity to my motions, and the men are getting closer, shouting your name. I must steady myself on your shoulders (the heat of your skin sinking into mine once more, and you don’t pause except to say, “That’s right, buddy, just like that,”) and then I manage to get my leg over the seat and settle myself behind you.

“Perfect.” You holster the gun and do something that makes the bike rumble. “Now hang on.”

Hang on? To what?

“Hang on to me, Wes, we gotta _go_.”

Oh.

Carefully, I wrap my arms around your waist. The bike rumbles again, then shoots off down the street, away from the men from the city.

As we ride, I gently tighten my grip, resting my head against your back.

Even though the clothing, I can feel your heat through the places we touch, and I feel warm again.

I close my eyes and smile.

\---

Travis drove for over an hour, winding through tiny alleys and side streets. He didn’t really think Sutton would send people in immediate pursuit—there were so many more things to do than chase after one guy, and it seemed like a waste of manpower. But he couldn’t _guarantee_ that, and there was no way Travis would lead people like Crowl back to Wes’s hotel. Crowl would come in and slaughter every corpse he could see, and he wouldn’t give a damn if there was an actual thinking person inside the dead body.

He couldn’t risk Wes. He couldn’t risk _any_ of them until he figured this out and _showed_ everyone the truth.

He wasn’t…entirely certain _what_ exactly that truth was, just yet, or how he was going to get the proof he needed. But he was determined to find out.

When he was certain no one was following him, he took the bike back to the hotel. The bike was loud in the silence of the street—every corpse in the vicinity turned to look at him; the elderly couple in front of the hardware store, the little cluster in front of the hotel, the dark-skinned woman standing in the doorway of the empty restaurant across the street. Travis very bravely did not reach for his gun, though the urge was there. But they weren’t making a move towards him.

No one took a single step towards him.

He turned the bike off, and the silence of a dead city enveloped him, pressing in bands against his chest until it was hard to breathe.

No, wait, that was just Wes.

He shifted, trying to dislodge the corpse’s arms around him. “Wes, buddy, could you maybe—”

Then he froze, because he felt something familiar, a soft tickling on the back of his neck. Not the sharp tingling he got whenever someone was watching him, but—

_There_. A barely-there caress, like a gentle breeze on his skin.

Travis swallowed, twisted on the seat until he was facing Wes. “Wes,” he whispered, and even that seemed too loud. “Are you _breathing?”_

Wes blinked, frowned. If he _was_ breathing, Travis couldn’t tell just by looking.

“Don’t bite me, okay?” he murmured, bringing his hand up in front of Wes’s nose and mouth. Wes merely blinked again.

And Travis felt the tiniest, shallowest puff of air against his fingertips.

“Holy fuck.”

Travis pulled back, ran his hands over his face. This couldn’t be happening. It was one thing to find a corpse that could think and maybe feel, but _this?_ This was…

Wes had _not_ been breathing a week ago, or even a few days ago! Travis had been there, had stood right there and washed Wes’s shoulder bite and there had been no sign of movement, no expansion in that scarred torso indicating breath—

Travis’s eyes flew open.

Scars.

“Come on.” He climbed off the bike, nearly falling in his haste, and helped Wes off. Then he grabbed Wes’s hand and started toward the hotel, veering a circle around the other corpses. “I need to check something out.”

When he was a kid, he used to watch these horror movies where the dead came back to life. _Zombies_ , they were called.

(The newscasters used the zombie word, back when this first started. After a while they just stopped. Travis figured it was because _zombies_ sounded too sci-fi. Easier to just call them what they were: corpses.)

In the movies, the zombies would have injuries, huge gaping wounds and ugly holes that never sealed up.

Why would a corpse have scars?

In Wes’s hotel room, Travis pushed Wes towards the bed. “Sit,” he ordered, and Wes obediently sank onto the end of the bed. With fingers that suddenly felt clumsy (the shock of realization, maybe) he started unbuttoning Wes’s jacket and shirt.

The corpse in the hall, the one that attacked him. He’d been more like the zombies of old, with a big gaping wound in his neck that hadn’t ever closed up, but _Wes_ —Wes had _scars_ , actual scars, which meant some kind of _healing process_ , but why would a corpse need to heal?

Unless…

_Too far gone_ , Wes had said, so maybe there were, like, _levels_ of deadness. And corpses like Wes were just a little bit… _less_ dead than the corpse in the hall.

A little less dead. A little more _alive_.

Almost afraid of what he’d find, he tugged Wes’s clothes off his shoulder.

And then he stared.

It wasn’t _healed_ , not in three days. But it was _healing_ , a dark black-ish scab covering the bite Wes had received. A _scab_.

_Why would a corpse have scars?_

Like this, he could see it, the shallow movement of Wes’s chest as he breathed. _Breathed_ , and holy fuck, Wes was _breathing_.

“Lay down?” he asked, pushing gently at Wes’s good shoulder. “Just. Let me check one more thing?”

Without protest, Wes lay back, his eyes never leaving Travis. Travis swallowed and crawled up on the bed, lying beside him. The corpse (is he even a corpse anymore, if he’s breathing?) craned his head, trying to continue watching him, but Travis just patted his chest and murmured, “Shh.”

Looking extremely disgruntled, Wes laid his head on the bed. Travis, on the other hand, was feeling apprehensive and nervous and kind of excited. It was a disgusting riot of emotion and he kind of thought he was about to throw up.

Biting his lip, he laid his own head down in the center of Wes’s chest.

And he waited.

Aaand…he waited.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was completely wrong, or maybe Wes just hadn’t gotten there yet—

_Th-thump._

Travis closed his eyes, and he waited. It took a long time, longer than any normal human would ever be able to survive between heartbeats, probably, but it did come again.

_Th-thump._

Wes’s heart was beating.

Travis could feel tears in his eyes. It took everything he had not to let them fall. 

_“There’s no cure for being a corpse,”_ Jonelle had said, but the proof was right here.

_Th-thump._

Wes had a heartbeat, and he was breathing, and his wounds were scabbing over, and none of that had been true a week ago (except maybe the scabbing thing).

Maybe there was a way to fix this after all.

Maybe they could fix _everything._

\---

I could stay like this forever.

\---

This changed things. If Wes was somehow becoming _alive_ again, then Travis needed to bring that out as much as possible, as _quickly_ as possible. He didn’t know if Sutton would rally men to find him, but if he did, then Travis didn’t have a lot of time.

He needed to have Wes as human as possible, needed to give the captain incontrovertible proof of his claims.

“Wes,” he said, sitting up. “Wes, I need you to listen.”

Slowly, Wes sat up as well, watching him with a concerned frown. Travis took a breath.

Maybe this was going to sound as absurd to Wes as it did to him—but the evidence was in Wes’s beating heart.

“Wes,” he said, as calmly as he could despite the way his own heart threatened to jump out of his chest. “I think you’re becoming human again.”

Wes gave Travis that typical blank-faced stare.

Travis didn’t let that deter him. “And I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. You’re breathing and your heart is beating and I don’t know why or how—”

He would have gone on, but Wes made a wheezy little sound in his throat, and Travis stopped abruptly, afraid the guy was, like, choking on his new-found breath or something.

Then Wes made the sound again, and Travis saw the amusement in the blonde’s eyes, and he realized that Wes was _laughing_. Awesome.

“What’s so funny?”

“Y-you,” Wes said, and even better, he was laughing _at_ Travis. Wonderful.

“Oh, well I’m glad you think it’s so funny, I’ll have you know it’s a perfectly valid theory—”

“No.” Wes cut him off gently, poking him lightly in the chest. “It’sss—you. Why or hhhow.”

Travis blinked. “Oh.” Well. That was… that was the sort of thing to make a man a little emotional, when all was said and done.

“Okay.” Travis took a breath, ran his hands through his hair. “Okay, then. We need to—we need to bring it out _more_ , to make you _more_ human. Do you understand?”

Wes blinked at him, frowned ever so slightly. “M-make…me…hhhuman?”

“Yes.” Travis reached out, tugged Wes’s shirt back into place and started doing up the buttons. No need for Wes to walk around with his chest all exposed, it probably wouldn’t do his newfound circulation any good. (What color would Wes bleed now?) “I need to show my people what’s going on here. I need to make them _believe_ me. And that’s not gonna work if you’re more corpse than man.”

But Wes simply frowned again and repeated, “Make mmme _human_.”

“ _Yes_ , Wes,” Travis said, semi-patiently.

Abruptly, Wes stood, pulling from Travis’s grasp. He moved to the doorway, pausing long enough to look back at Travis, a clear invitation. Baffled, Travis stood; Wes disappeared down the hall.

Travis caught up to him in the lobby, long enough to catch Wes’s sleeve in his fingertips. “Wes,” he hissed, eyeing the corpses outside warily, “Where are you going?”

But Wes tugged gently from his grasp and strode outside. Travis lingered in the doorway, watching as Wes walked right up to the woman in doctor’s coat.

He couldn’t hear them talking—mostly they just sounded sort of like they were grunting and moaning at each other, from this distance—but they must have been communicating somehow. Maybe the moaning _was_ their way of communicating. Travis tried not to be nervous when the lady doctor turned to stare at him, her gaze as sharp as Wes’s had ever been. Travis smiled nervously and waved his fingers.

As Wes talked(?) with the doctor, the others drifted closer, a little group of corpses whose eyes were fixed on Travis or Wes. Travis’s fingers itched for his gun, but he resolutely kept his hands at his sides. They hadn’t attacked him yet. They hadn’t attacked him before, either. Maybe they only attacked if they were hungry, when they turned lethal and ravenous. Maybe, the rest of the time, they were like Wes, just sort of drifting along until something came along to change everything up.

Wes turned from the doctor, crossing the distance between them. It was funny—if any of the other corpses had come at him like that, Travis would have flinched back, probably would have reached for his gun. But with Wes, there was no fear.

He hadn’t been afraid of Wes pretty much from the start.

( _Oh Marks_ , he thought with more than a little amusement, _you have fallen so far down the rabbit hole_.)

“Th-em,” Wes said, more of a statement than a question.

Travis peered around Wes’s shoulder at the little cluster of corpses. “What about them?”

“Mmmake them hu-man t-too.”

Startled, Travis looked at Wes. “Wes, buddy, I can’t…” If the Captain was going to rally the troops and sweep the city to find him, Travis had _days_ , if that. It took Wes a _week_ to get where he was. There was no way Travis could do for them what he’d done for Wes. He wasn’t even sure _what_ he’d done for Wes, he sure as hell couldn’t replicate it!

But Wes stared implacably at him, and in his eyes…in his eyes was a painful yearning, and Travis ached because he’d felt that same emotion long before the world ended.

He looked over Wes’s shoulder again, _really_ looked, and saw a group of desperate, lonely people, watching him with that same aching desire in their eyes.

He’d always had a soft spot for strays.

Travis sighed, shoulders slumping. “Fine,” he grumbled, “but I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

The way Wes lit up, though, from the inside out, made that seem like no problem at all.

\---

There are nine of us, in the end, standing in the lobby of the hotel. The doctor stands on one side of the loose circle we’ve made; you stand next to me on the other. The rest stand between us, the black man and the black woman, the two old ones from the hardware store, the white man and the girl in the flowered dress. 

They are all staring at you, watching. Waiting.

You swallow. “I don’t…” You shift on your feet, _fidget_ , such a _human_ thing to do. The dead are still, even when we are moving.

You look at me, eyes wide. “I don’t know what to _do_.”

I know what you must do.

“N-ames.”

The doctor’s eyes move to me. The others don’t turn their gazes from you. (They can see it, can feel it, the warmth of your body, your heart, your _life_ , running through your veins. They cannot have it. They can _share_ it, in these moments, but what you have given is _mine_ , tingling through my fingertips. I will not allow them to take it.)

You blink. “What?”

I look around the circle. “N-ame. Them.”

We don’t have names. We lost them, when we lost ourselves, we died and everything we were vanished. I cannot explain how important names are, to you who has never lost your name. But it is something the dead do not have—the day you named me, you separated me from the rest, gave me something that could be mine, something every human has. Something to hold on to.

_“You hold on like your life depends on it.”_

Name them, and they will have something to hold on to.

\---

Name them.

Okay. Travis could do that.

He looked around the room, at these patiently waiting faces, and took a breath. “Okay. Names.” This shouldn’t be that hard, right? Humans loved naming things—babies, animals, inanimate objects. Travis named Wes after an old teacher. This should be easy enough.

So of course, now that the pressure was on, Travis couldn’t think of a single name.

He took a small breath, stepping into the circle and moving around the ring, studying the faces around him. They stared back, waiting, and he had _nothing_.

He paused in front of the doctor, biting his lip as he looked her up and down, waiting for inspiration to strike. On the pocket of her stained lab coat was an embroidered, stylized _M_ , the logo for some clinic years ago, still legible after all this time. 

And just like that, he had it.

“Emma,” he said, and smiled softly. “Dr. Emma.”

She smiled at him, not with her mouth but with her eyes, and after that, it was easy.

The old couple became Mr. and Mrs. Dumont, after the hardware store they sat in front of. (Travis couldn’t help it, he was a romantic at heart).

The girl in the flowered dress and the white guy at her side became Peter and Dakota. Travis was never going to tell them that they were named after a couple of springer spaniels that used to live next door to one of his foster homes. But seriously, they both had curly brown hair and big brown eyes and it wasn’t like naming things was his forte, okay.

Clyde was a buddy he’d had in high school, great guy with a friendly smile. The black man in front of him wasn’t smiling, but Travis figured that was because he was a corpse—the smiling would come. Probably.

Then there was Rozelle, who had been one of his favorite foster sisters, fierce and sweet and loyal and the best person he’d ever known. She’d moved away when he was still in high school, and he never heard from her again—he simply assumed she’d died at some point during the apocalypse, just like everyone else who hadn’t survived in the walled settlement. Travis didn’t think she’d mind giving her name for a cause like this.

He took his place beside Wes, looking at the group once more.

Then he chuckled. “This is like rehab,” he said, gesturing. A group of people standing in a circle with a doctor at one end. “Or, like, therapy. Human-therapy.” And he chuckled again, though the others just stared blankly at him.

Wow. Tough crowd. This was gonna be fun.

\---

Names have power. By naming us, you have given us something we did not have before. Suddenly, we have gone from dead things to something with _meaning_. I watch the realization ripple around the circle, as the full impact of this sinks in.

You have turned us from mere corpses into _people_ , and that is worth more than you will ever realize. Names have power, and the power in naming us is that we have something to hold onto. Something to keep us from fading too far away.

By naming them, they are already so much farther than they were, so much _more_. 

At my side, you shift from foot to foot, sigh noisily. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to _do_ , man,” you whisper, casting uneasy glances around the circle. 

You don’t understand. You don’t need to _do_ anything. I was struck the first time I saw you, your eyes moving through me like lightning. You did not have to _do_ anything to change me; simply being near you, your warmth, your vibrant energy, your _life_ was enough.

I think we have forgotten what it is to be human, and you are so _very_ human. I stand by your side and I start to remember; you touch me and I am warm once more.

You do not have to _do_ anything to be enough.

“Come on, Wes.” You reach out, tugging at my sleeve. “Gimme a hint here. What should I do?”

You are so earnest. And you wish to help. You _want_ to help us, when you have every reason to prefer us dead (deader than we are).

You are incredible, and my heart aches for it.

“T-touch.” The words come easier than they did in the beginning, the more that I use them. Or perhaps it is as you say—I am becoming human, more than I was, and so I am able to speak. (The dead have no voice, no need for words.) I nod toward the circle. “T—ouch them.”

“Touch them,” you repeat, looking at the circle of patiently waiting dead. “Okay. I guess that’s what we’re doing then.” You take a breath, rub your hands together, and step into the circle.

You stop in front of Dakota, reach out and slowly take her hands, and I watch the awe fill her face as your warmth sinks into her skin.

We have been cold for so long, and you are so _warm_ , and it is the most amazing thing for you to share it with us.

\---

The rest of the day was very strange. Considering Travis had spent a good chunk of his life living in a bona-fide zombie apocalypse, that was saying something.

It wasn’t even like they really did anything that weird. Mostly Travis walked around the circle of corpses a lot, touching their hands or arms, and talked at them. Mostly they stared at him, which was incredibly unnerving when Wes did it and was thousand times more unnerving when seven more pairs of eyes were doing it.

Still, he felt he’d made some progress. By the time he called it a night, most of the group was talking back at him. They were like Wes, back at the beginning, stumbling over very small words and very short sentences. Still. It was something.

He didn’t know if it would be _enough_.

“I think Dr. Emma is a little more…” He waved a hand as he stepped into Wes’s hotel room. (A corpse with a hotel room, a corpse who called a hotel room _home_. That should have been his first clue.) “I don’t know. Just _more_ , I guess.”

It was in the way she watched him. The doctor just seemed a lot more _there_ than the others. Not quite as far as Wes was, but then again, Travis had been taken by Wes a week ago. That was a lot more time for Wes to relearn how to be human.

Travis flopped back onto the bed with a sigh, sneezing twice as dust irritated his nose. “What do you think?”

Wes carefully closed the broken door—all the way, and Travis realized that Wes had never done that before. Corpses couldn’t work doorknobs, and Wes had never fully closed the door.

Travis idly wondered if it was because Wes could work doorknobs now, or if it was because Travis, who _could_ work doorknobs, was here.

Wes didn’t say anything as he settled on the end of the bed, watching him. Travis hadn’t really expected anything less. Let’s just say that conversational skills were not one of Wes’s strong suits.

He sighed heavily, staring at the ceiling. “I’m afraid we won’t have enough time,” he muttered, feeling a cold knot of unease in his stomach. If only he had _time_. Give him a week, and he’d have his little group so much closer to being human. Look how far Wes had come in a week! Give him enough time, and he could convert them all, walk them triumphant back to the settlement and show everyone the truth.

But he didn’t think he had that much time. Oh, it was just a gut feeling, but trusting his gut had kept him alive when others weren’t. They were coming for him.

He could pretend it was because he’d taken Jason’s motorcycle—it was a nice bike, and it worked, so they’d want to retrieve it if they could.

But he knew it wasn’t about the bike.

It was because he was potentially _dangerous_.

He could imagine all too clearly how it would go. They’d all sit down, the captain, Kate and Amy, his top lieutenants, Jonelle for her medical advice, and Crowl, because he was the one who always suggested what no one else wanted to suggest. By now they’d no doubt declared him insane—after all, corpses who weren’t really corpses? That was just crazy talk.

And crazy people were unpredictable.

The most dangerous people were the ones you couldn’t predict. If any of them thought for one _instant,_ that he would do something reckless and dangerous, like sneak a corpse into the settlement to prove his theory…well, they wouldn’t let that happen. They would _make sure_ that couldn’t happen.

Oh, yes, they were coming for him. It was just a question of _when_.

He needed _time_ , and that was just the one thing he _didn’t_ have.

Oh well. There was nothing for it but to do what he could and hope it all worked out. That was pretty much the way he’d lived his life, and it seemed to be alright so far.

With a great big groan, Travis pulled himself into a sitting position. “Why’d everything have to get so _complicated?”_ he muttered, rubbing his face. It was easier a week ago, when his biggest worry was not getting _eaten_. Now corpses were becoming human and he was totally being hunted by his own people and he missed how it was before.

Okay, he amended silently, glancing at Wes. He didn’t _exactly_ miss how it was before. What he missed was the _simplicity_ of that life. He knew what to do, knew who his enemies were and who his friends were. Point and shoot, that was his life. Now…

He wouldn’t change it, but _man_ , things were easier back then.

“Hey, Wes?” He leaned over, bumped Wes’s shoulder gently. “Of all the corpses who could have kidnapped me, I’m glad it was you.”

And as Wes turned to look at him, face a subtle play of emotion, Travis smiled at him.

It might have been easier before, but _this_ —this was so much _better_.

\---

You smile, and I ache. It is similar to the hunger; for so long it has been inside me, a gnawing need, the only way to satiate it to sink my teeth into someone else. This, oh, it is very close, a desire to consume you, to swallow you whole, to take you into myself and never let you go. 

I do not want to hurt you, but I want you.

Have I ever felt this way before?

_she leans in with a smile, hand cupping my cheek, and murmurs, “I love you,” as she presses her lips to mine_

Memories. Slight and ephemeral, never carrying enough context to understand. Why that memory? Why this moment? Is this love, this aching need inside of me? I don’t _know_. I don’t remember enough to recognize the feeling, to know if I even ever felt it.

I have often cursed my death, of everything I had taken from me when my life stopped, but I have never regretted it as much as now. If only I could _remember_ , if only I could _understand_ —

Is the clue in the motion? It spoke of affection, of fondness. I reach out, slide my hand across your cheek, stubble scraping my palm. (another flash of memory, _dragging the razor along my jaw, leaving smooth skin behind_ , and I think, absurdly, _you haven’t shaved today_ )

My touch startles you. You pause, eyes wide, so close I can see each subtle movement of thought in your eyes.

“Wes?”

I lean in.

Your breath hitches, your heart rate increases. Are you afraid? I know the scent of your fear, this is not quite the same. I pause, give you a chance to pull away—but you don’t move.

I close the distance between us, gently press my lips against yours. You are soft and warm and taste like nothing I can remember—I have eaten people, but that is less about taste, little more than blood and meat sliding past my tongue. This is so very different.

I could do this for a long time and be happy.

Slowly, you pull away, studying me. “What was that for?” you ask curiously. But not displeased.

I blink.

You laugh, a soft explosion of air that brushes across my face. “Well,” you say brightly, hands coming up to wrap around the back of my neck, “Let me just say I am _not_ showing this to the others.”

And you lean in.

\---

Maybe he really had gone crazy, Travis thought, tilting his head to better fit against Wes’s mouth. It was like kissing a wet board—Wes just _sat_ there, unresponsive, but Travis was pretty sure that was just because Wes had no idea what he was doing. After all, Wes _did_ kiss him first.

Kissing a man who’d been a corpse a week ago. Maybe he _had_ gone crazy.

Travis could live with that.

\---

I am walking in a field. I am confused how I got here—I was in the hotel room, in a city, but there are no buildings visible, nothing but tall grass for miles.

The grass rustles, brushing my knees as I move, and abruptly I realize that someone is holding both of my hands. I look to my left—you are there, smiling at the sky. You are holding my hand, but don’t seem to notice I’m there.

I look to my right, and pause. The woman is staring right at me, dark hair and blue eyes and gentle smile, a perfect replica from the flashes of memory.

“What is this?” I ask, and my own voice startles me. It is clear, fluid, no stuttering or hesitation, as though I never forgot how to speak.

The woman laughs, a perfect, beautiful sound chiming through the air. She waves her free hand at the space around us. “This? This is a dream. This is the future. This is _hope_.”

I frown at her. “I don’t understand.”

“I know.” Her smile is sweet, sympathetic. “But you will. Someday.”

I stare. “Who are you?”

Her smile never wavers. She reaches out, presses her hand flat on my chest. Against her palm, I can feel the steady thud of my heart.

(it aches)

“Oh darling,” she sighs, “I’m right here. I am _always_ right here.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yes, well.” She shrugs, her smile turning coy, mischievous. “Dreams never give you what you want. Sometimes, though, you get something _better_.”

“Better?” I frown again, looking at her hand on my chest. “Like what?”

She laughs once more, bringing her hand up, cupping my face the same way she’d once done in my memory. “I told you,” she chides gently. “ _Hope_.”

As she leans in, I close my eyes—

“Come on, Wes, wakey wakey.”

I blink, disoriented to find you leaning over me, your hand curled around me cheek. You beam when you see me, patting my face gently. “So you sleep now too, huh? That’s _awesome_. Jonelle’s mind is gonna be _blown_.”

You step back. I sit up slowly, staring. A _dream_ , the woman said, and now I understand. Like a nightmare, but so much less fearsome. How _strange_.

“Whhhat?” I ask, and the word is slow and clumsy. For a moment, I miss the clarity of the dream, when thoughts came easily and I didn’t need to struggle for words.

But in the dream, you did not smile at me as you are smiling now. I would rather have this than a thousand words.

“The sun is up and we’ve got a lot of work to do,” you say cheerfully, grasping my hand and pulling me to my feet. When I am upright, you don’t release my hand. “Can’t spend all day dilly-dallying. Let’s go!”

I let you pull me from the room. You hold my hand the entire time.

\---

They came just after noon.

Travis had been hoping for one more day. Even just one more day would have made a world of difference. But he heard the trucks rumbling down the road, and he knew he’d run out of time.

He ushered his little corpse group away from the windows, peeking through the faded drapes. Two jeeps and a truck sat idling at the end of the road. As he watched, the engines went silent, and people spilled out into the street. How did they—

The bike. He’d forgotten about it, just left it in the middle of the street, so they’d drawn the (rightful) conclusion that he must be somewhere nearby.

Travis cursed his stupidity, counting the people he could see. At least two dozen people, but he knew the capacity of those trucks—there could be as many as thirty people outside. There was the captain, standing in front of the lead jeep, Kate and Amy flanking him, ever faithful. Jonelle was there, med kit in hand and a hard look on her face, and Randi was hanging on the edge of the crowd, holding her gun like she wasn’t ready to use it. Crowl was there too, strutting like a cocky peacock, issuing orders for people to sweep the buildings. Travis cursed again.

He couldn’t run, not without leaving his group behind. And there was no way he could get all of these corpses out without getting found, not without taking some casualties. They weren’t in hunting mode—these guys were slow, and ungainly, and they’d never be able to outrun a bunch of determined humans on the hunt.

He couldn’t let his people get to this building. He _couldn’t_.

He made a split-second decision and checked his gun. He’d wasted most of his bullets shooting cover yesterday, making his great escape, but he had a few. Not that he planned to use it. It was the principle of the thing, really; in this post-apocalyptic world, he just felt _better_ with a weapon on him at all times.

God, he really hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.

He recognized every one of those people out there. There was Randi, and the captain, and John fucking Crowl. People he grew up with, fought beside, loved. They were his _family_. 

He looked to his left, Wes at the other window, watching the men and women pile out of the jeeps. His face was as blank as ever, but Travis could see how tightly Wes was clutching the drapes. 

He couldn’t let them destroy all of this. Not before they knew. Not before they _understood_.

“I’m gonna go talk to them.” He shoved his gun the back of his jeans and strode towards the door. Wes darted after him, grabbing his arm and pulling him to a stop, and this close, Travis could see _something_ in those icy eyes. Not quite fear, but close enough.

Wes was so close, more than halfway there. If Travis didn’t stop them, they’d come in shooting, and they would lose _everything_.

He put on his best smile. “It’s okay, baby. I’m just gonna talk to them. You can watch from the doorway.”

Wes didn’t look assured. Travis didn’t expect he would. But he slowly released Travis’s arm, mouth tight, and when Travis moved for the front door again he followed like a shadow, the sharp weight of his gaze prickly on the back of Travis’s neck.

He smirked, just for a second. This was almost familiar.

“Okay.” He turned, gave Wes a reassuring smile. “Okay. Wish me luck.”

He strode out before Wes could say anything, hands held out at his sides, calling, “Don’t shoot! It’s just me! I’m unarmed! Don’t shoot!”

\---

You’re gone. I watch you walk out the door and just like that, you’re gone, out of reach and more distant than the mere feet separating us.

My hands clench at my sides, my stomach twists, and I can’t stop watching you, reassuring myself you’re still alright. What is this? Is this fear?

(it’s _horrible_ )

Please be okay.

I think, _Good luck_ , and never take my eyes off you.

\---

Guns came up as he emerged. Travis wished he could say he was surprised. “I’m unarmed,” he called again, hands held high above his head. “Don’t shoot.”

A couple of people lowered their weapons. Most of them, however, kept their guns right where they were.

The captain stepped forward, face twisted, and there was just enough space between them that Travis couldn’t tell if Cap was angry or upset or what. “Marks,” he called, voice tight, and that was easier to read except there were _so many_ emotions in the captain’s voice that Travis couldn’t separate them all out.

Travis smiled and tried not to show how nervous he was, how his stomach was twisting and churning. Everyone was inside the hotel— _Wes_ was inside the hotel. If Travis couldn’t convince his people, then his entire group would be wiped out.

“Hey, Cap!” he called cheerfully. “Jonelle, Randi, Crowl. How’s it going?”

“Get outta the way, Marks,” Crowl growled, and some people were having doubts about pointing their weapons at him, Travis could tell, because he was one of _them_. But Crowl, his hands were rock-steady. Bastard.

Travis continued smiling, though he did fold down his fingers so just the middle digits were sticking up. “Not gonna happen, buddy.”

Randi bit her lip and ducked her head, probably to keep from laughing. Well, at least _someone_ appreciated his humor. After spending so much time with Wes and his group, Travis almost forgot what it was like to be considered funny.

The captain made a face, his, ‘God why are you so stubborn?’ look. This was not a look exclusively for Travis, though he was proud to say he got it the lion’s share of it most of the time.

“What are you doing, Travis?” the captain asked plaintively. “Why are you _protecting_ them?”

Travis let out a breath. “I’m gonna put my hands down, okay? And I’m still unarmed, so I’d _really_ appreciate it if none of you shot me.” Slowly, he brought his hands down. “That means you, Crowl. Get your finger off that trigger.”

Crowl didn’t take his finger off the trigger, because he was a complete and utter bastard. But most of the others did, pointed their guns at the ground and watched him with confusion and trepidation written on every inch of their faces.

When his hands were at his sides, the captain sighed and asked again, “Why are you protecting them?”

“Because they need it,” Travis replied, and it was as simple as that. That was the way it worked. Protect yourself. Then protect anyone who couldn’t protect themselves. Wes had spent so long being an invincible, undead machine that he wouldn’t know the first thing about protecting himself. The others were less human that Wes, but that just meant they’d have even less of an idea than Wes did.

If Travis was the only thing between his people and the slaughter of his group, then he wasn’t going to budge.

\---

Fear is an awful, insidious thing, twisting through my limbs and curling around my spine, leaving a bitter, sharp taste in the back of my throat. It makes me cold all over again, and the throbbing ache of my heart goes faster, threatening to burst right out of my chest.

You are so _small_ out there, small and alone and facing so many, and there is _nothing_ I can do.

A hand touches my arm. I turn, and the doctor nods solemnly at me. The others are here as well, standing so not to be seen through the windows, watching the scene unfold outside.

There is a solidarity here. It does not ease the fear inside of me—but there is a comfort, in seeing a similar fear in their faces, their eyes.

We do not want you to die.

_I_ do not want you to die.

Please do not die.

I stand at the window and clutch the drapes, watching, and my fear is bitter and cold.

\---

“We were wrong.” Travis waved a hand at the desolate city around them. “Captain, we were wrong about _everything_.”

“They’re monsters, Marks,” Sutton said, short and flat. “They _eat people_. These corpses you’re protecting, they might have eaten someone _you_ care about. And you still want to protect them?”

“I _know that!”_ Travis snapped, gesticulating wildly in his agitation. “Do you think I don’t know that? You lost your wife, Cap. I lost my best friend. We’ve _all_ lost people. But that doesn’t mean we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. We can _end_ this!”

“Get out of the way and we _will_ ,” Crowl growled.

“ _You’re. Not. Listening_.” Travis turned, beseeching, to the captain, who was really the only one who mattered. Even men like Crowl would follow their leader’s orders. “Captain, _please_. They’re not what we thought. They’re _different_.”

“They _eat people_ ,” Sutton retorted, not looking swayed in the slightest.

“Yeah, well, so would you, if you didn’t have a choice,” Travis snapped back. “I’m telling you, Cap, they’re _changing_. A corpse saved me, and that—that _sparked_ something in him, and now he’s not really a corpse anymore. If we can fix them—”

Crowl scoffed. “ _Fix_ them. First he doesn’t want to shoot them, now he wants to _fix_ them. Captain, just let me go in there and take care of this.”

He wasn’t changing Sutton’s mind. Words alone weren’t doing it. And Travis could see the captain actually thinking about Crowl’s suggestion.

If Crowl went in the hotel, he would shoot every corpse on sight. Travis _couldn’t let that happen_.

“I have proof.”

That made Sutton’s eyes snap to him once more. Travis swallowed, and tried to ignore the unease curling in his belly.

“I have proof, Captain. I can show you. They’re not what we thought.”

Sutton didn’t say _Yes, go show me your proof Travis so I can be wowed._

But he didn’t say no, either.

Travis took a breath and moved toward the hotel.

\---

I meet you at the door of the hotel. You smile unconvincingly and say, “It’s going great.”

I find that I do not believe you.

You glance at the crowd of people in the street. “Okay. So. I need you to come out with me, Wes.”

Fear is sharp and bitter and cold, and it rises up in my throat. I take a small step back. “No. They’ll sh-shoot.”

“They won’t.” You smile once more, and your eyes are tight at the corners. “I won’t let them.”

I do not want to get shot. I know how humans are, they always shoot. (You did not shoot, but you are different. You are _special_.)

“Please, Wes.” You hold out your hand. “Do you trust me?”

I look at your hand.

Then I look around, at the corpses in the lobby, and the crowd of humans outside. This is a culmination, a build-up of everything that started from the first moment I saw you ( _blue eyes blue as the sky shining bright_ )

Do I trust you?

Do I have a choice?

Slowly, I slide my hand into yours and step into the light.

\---

Guns came up as soon as Wes stepped into the street, all those lowered weapons snapping upright at the sight of the enemy. Travis gave Wes’s hand a quick squeeze, not sure if he was trying to give Wes comfort or take it for himself. His other hand came up, and he took a big breath, trying to puff himself up, to block as much of Wes as he could.

“No, no, don’t shoot! I keep telling you, he’s not _like_ that!”

Wes stuck close to his back, quiet and tense. He certainly wasn’t making any move to present himself as a target. Still, Travis was terribly grateful the captain put his hand up, stalling itchy trigger fingers.

“This is Wes,” he said, continuing to keep himself between Wes and the others. “He saved my life because he liked my eyes.”

“That’s ‘cuz you got the whole bedroom eyes thing going on,” Randi called, and titters went through the group. Travis flashed her a grateful smile—beautiful girl, cracking jokes to try and relieve some of the tension. Tense, scared people had twitchy trigger fingers; people who were laughing were less likely to shoot.

He coaxed Wes a couple of steps further into the street, still keeping his body between Wes and all those guns. “He _saved_ me, Cap,” he said, staring at the captain, willing Sutton to believe him. “He saved my life, and it…I don’t know, it _started_ something. Not just in him, in others too. They’re _changing_. They’re _different_.” 

“You can’t know that, Travis,” Sutton said, and he sounded tired, like he was done arguing. Like he was resigning himself. Travis felt a twinge of panic.

“He’s breathing!”

Stunned silence met his exclamation—even Crowl’s gun dropped an inch in shock. Travis pressed his advantage.

“He’s _breathing_ , Captain. And he’s got a heartbeat, and his wounds _heal_ , just like a living person’s. He wasn’t doing that a week ago.” Except maybe the healing thing, but Travis wasn’t going to mention that right this second.

“That’s not possible.” Jonelle pushed her way to the front of the crowd, staring at Travis—at Wes hidden behind him. “You can’t _cure_ being dead!”

“Yeah, well, looks like I managed,” Travis snapped. He looked at Sutton again—Sutton, who had been standing there silently, face blank, no indication of what he was thinking. Travis took a step forward. “Captain. I know we lost people we care about. And I know it’s not—it’s not how any of us thought this would go. But _please_. We can _fix this_.” He took another step forward, as though proximity would make the captain listen better, would allow Sutton to _hear_ what he was saying.

He took another step, and it was just enough to expose Wes.

Crowl took his shot. 

Travis knew his mistake the instant he took that step, and he was already moving before Crowl finished pulling the trigger. Bullets traveled thousands of feet per second, but Travis had a shorter distance to go—by the time the bullet reached them, Travis was in front of Wes, and instead of going through Wes, it tore right through Travis’s shoulder instead.

The impact sent him staggering back, colliding into Wes. Wes’s cold arms wrapped around him, kept him from falling, but Travis was a bit more preoccupied by sudden, white-hot pain radiating from his arm. When he looked down, through the spots in his vision, he could see blood staining his shirt.

“You fucking _bastard_ ,” he shouted, slumping against Wes. “I fucking _told you_ not to _shoot me!”_

And then his legs sort of gave out.

For a not-so-dead corpse who couldn’t really manage stairs a few days ago, Wes was surprisingly gentle when he lowered Travis to the ground. He looked at the wound in Travis’s shoulder, hands fluttering uncertainly, and considering he’d learned pretty much all of his facial expressions in the past week or so, Wes was looking rather frantic.

“Hey.” Travis tried to reach up, lift his hand, but even his good arm seemed to be attached to lead weights. He tried to smile instead—that was marginally more successful. “Hey, it’s gonna be okay.”

And then Wes looked at him, and his eyes—

Oh.

Wes’s eyes were bright blue, as clear and pure and cloudless as the sky.

“Blue,” he whispered, raising one shaky hand to touch Wes’s cheek, and it was a Herculean feat but suddenly nothing else seemed as important. “Sky blue.”

He got it now.

That was what he saw as he sank into unconsciousness, eyes as bright and clear as the blue sky above.

\---

No no _no!_

_Travis!_

\---

This was what happened, as related to Travis by Randi later:

Travis went down, and Jonelle was already moving forward, medical kit in hand. The captain was turning to shut Crowl down for taking the shot, and then a sound tore the air apart.

It was the cry of every mother who’d lost her child, of every child lost and alone while monsters crept in the dark. It was husbands and wives losing one another, siblings being torn apart from each other. It was the sound of agony, of grief, of pain that never ended.

It was a cry they all knew, and it stopped them in their tracks.

The corpse Travis had named Wes was kneeling over the wounded man, clutching him and screaming wordless loss.

For just a moment, that sound resonated in the hearts of every human nearby, and they could only stand there, memories of their own loss brought to the surface in stark relief. 

All except one. John Crowl, who was cold and cruel and never let anything so paltry as _loss_ affect him, moved forward, gun up to shoot the corpse that had made himself an easy target.

Randi was there first. She stepped out of the group, put herself in front of Travis and Wes, protecting them with her body, her own weapon aimed at Crowl’s chest with trembling hands.

(“Beautiful girl,” Travis crowed when she told him the story, “I think I love you,” and Randi rolled her eyes and smacked him gently, a smile tugging at her lips.)

“I can’t let you do that,” she said, and there was a warning in her voice and her finger was on the trigger.

That snapped the rest of them into action. Captain Sutton stepped forward, waving a hand for Crowl to stand down—not that Crowl listened. “What do you think you’re doing, Fletcher?” he snapped, “Get out of the way.”

Randi swallowed and shifted her stance, bracing herself. “I can’t do that, sir.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because he’s crying, sir.” She never took her eyes off Crowl, who still hadn’t lowered his weapon. “Corpses don’t cry. You said that, sir. I’m not going to let you shoot an unarmed man.”

And the captain looked past her and saw, not a ravenous corpse looming over his next meal, but a heartbroken man kneeling over a still, bloody body. It was a scene the captain had witnessed so many times, too many times to count.

Corpses don’t cry, or think, or feel. But Wes wasn’t quite a corpse anymore.

“Move,” Jonelle ordered, shoving past Crowl and Captain Sutton. “And put that down, you’re going to shoot someone,” she snapped over her shoulder, striding across the street without fear. As she approached, Wes lifted his head, teeth bared in a snarl, and wet streaks cut tracks down his face. Jonelle knelt in front of him, smiling, and, gentler than anyone who knew her would expect, said, “It’s okay, I’m a doctor.” She pulled on a pair of gloves. “I can keep him alive.”

Movement from the hotel had the walled city’s people bringing their weapons up. Out of the shadows stepped another corpse in a tattered lab coat, hands by her head.

“I. Can. Help,” Dr. Emma said, slowly, clearly. She knelt across from Jonelle, on the other side of Travis’s prone body, and told the doctor, “I can—help.”

Jonelle nodded. “Okay.” She pulled a pair of gloves out of her bag. “Hold out your hands, I’ll help you get these on.”

Captain Sutton stood there, watching a corpse help his doctor try to save the lives of one of his men. As they fought for Travis’s life, more figures emerged from the hotel: Dakota, in her faded flower dress, Peter trailing behind her; the Dumonts, stepping out together, holding hands; Clyde and Rozelle standing behind Wes, arms crossed, twin forces.

Captain Sutton looked at them, at these corpses-that-weren’t, and he saw something he’d never noticed before.

He saw _people_.

“Put it down,” he ordered softly, though most of his people had, by this time, already done so. When Crowl didn’t, Sutton reached out and, without looking away from the tableau in front of him, put his hands over Crowl’s. “Put it _down_. It’s _over_.”

This was how they saved the world.

\---

I don’t remember how it started. War, maybe, or disease, or a weapon so terrible it should never have been conceived in the first place. 

Maybe we just forgot, and our hearts grew cold and hollow inside our chests until there was nothing left. Maybe our hearts died first, and the rest of our bodies followed suit.

I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. What’s past is past. Now it’s time to look towards the future.

I don’t remember how it started, but I know how it ends.

It ends with love. With two men who refuse to give up, even after death. It ends with sincerity and trust and faith, a complete willingness to take a chance even when all the facts point to the opposite.

It ends with love, and from there, the world can grow.

You’ve told me you always came up here, sat on the top of the wall and looked out, remembering the city as it used to be. I prefer to look in, watching the tiny pocket of humanity, of _life_ , still going strong. Even now, I hunger for it—but it’s a different kind of hunger, softer, warmer, less ravenous. If I reach out with my hands instead of my teeth…

Well, then it might just be possible to grasp it.

“Hey, Wes.”

Smiling is still unfamiliar, strange, but I’m getting used to the slow shift of muscles, the gentle upturn of lips. I turn, and you’re standing there, arm in a sling, eyes bright and a matching smile on your face.

“Travis,” I say slowly, carefully, making sure to get it all right, the sharp beginning and the smooth glide of the rest of the letters. Saying your name is one of my favorite things. “You’re up.”

It’s meant to be a question, but inflection is difficult. You say, “Yup, I made a break for it,” and sit, legs swinging over the edge.

I try again. “Should you…be up?” You were shot. It’s been so long since I was injured like that, but I know what bullets can do, how they tear flesh, make you dead, red red blood shining like jewels—

“What?” You blink, then laugh. “Oh, no, I’m fine, I was joking. Believe me, I don’t want to get on Jonelle’s bad side by sneaking out. She released me, it’s all good.” You lean back on your good arm. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Watching.” I look out again, at the tiny bustle of people, of _life_. “It’s—beautiful.”

I’m not sure if you’ll understand—you, who spent so much time looking out, who never lost the feeling of being alive and thus never had cause to miss it.

But you look down at this tiny, thriving city, and you say, “Yeah, it is,” and I think maybe you do understand after all.

\---

For all the progress he’d made in the short time they’d been together, there were some aspects of being a corpse Wes had yet to get over. For instance, Wes was still way too capable of sitting in silence for hours at a time, but Travis had never had that patience. After just a few minutes, he fidgeted, adjusted his sling, and blurted, “Can I show you something?”

Wes turned, looked at him, and said, “Alright.” His face was mostly blank, which was completely typical, but Travis was getting good at reading him. He carried his emotions in his eyes, and Travis could so clearly see the curiosity inside him.

( _It was right in front of us this whole time,_ he thought, a swirl of regret and horror in his chest, one he thought would become much too familiar in the future, feelings that already kept him up at night and probably wouldn’t go away from a long, long time. _We were so blind for so long._ )

“Come on.” He climbed to his feet, grinned and beckoned Wes up. “I think you’re going to like it.”

As they made their way down the wall and through the walled city, Travis could see the occasional look thrown Wes’s way, wary and hostile. It wasn’t like he didn’t expect that to happen, wasn’t like he hadn’t known this would be a long, hard journey. Every single person in this town had lost someone they loved to the corpses. Now they were inviting the dead inside. Some people wouldn’t ever accept it.

But some people would; even as he walked, he could see changes, the dead integrating with the living. He saw Rozelle and Clyde kneeling on the ground, gently petting Randi’s dog, Dr. Emma trailing behind Jonelle in the medical tent, Sutton leading Mr. and Mrs. Dumont on a tour of the city, Peter and Dakota surrounded by curious children. And there were others, too, beyond his little group, coaxed inside the walls while he was confined to his bed. Humans and corpses working together, talking, learning how to live together.

How to live again.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

“Here.” He rounded a corner, stopped so Wes could catch up. “What do you think?”

It was the garden, half a city block’s worth of churned dirt and bright green sprouts. Travis didn’t work here much—he had a black thumb and was summarily banished to places his skills could be put to better use. But if there was one place in this settlement he thought Wes would love…

Wes made a small sound, kneeling beside the garden. Slowly, he reached out, pressing the dirt lightly with his fingertips. Travis didn’t know what Wes felt, but all of a sudden Wes uttered a tiny little, “ _Oh_ ,” and plunged his fingers down deep, and his face didn’t change all that much but Travis could almost feel the delight oozing out of him, and he grinned. Damn, he was good. 

“One of the rules is that everybody pulls their weight,” he explained, rocking on his heels. “Everyone helps out. So…do you wanna work here?”

Wes froze, then turned, mouth open in a soundless question. Travis nodded encouragingly. “Yeah. My brother, Money, he’s willing to show you the ropes. If you want.”

For a long minute, Wes just sat there, staring at him with that blank corpse-face, eyes shining with emotion but nothing reaching the rest of his face. 

And then—then he _smiled_ , and it was the most vibrant, the brightest Travis had yet seen the other man. It was a smile that transformed him, made him radiant, glowing with—

with _life_.

Travis swallowed against the sudden surge of emotion in his throat and nodded. “I’ll, uh, I’ll go get Money, then.” Wes nodded, turned back to the garden before him, but Travis didn’t move right away, watching him.

(this was how they saved the world)

As Wes let fresh soil trail over his fingers, Travis turned his face up and smiled into the blue, blue sky.


End file.
